LA StationeryThank you to everyone who responded. I have been using this list for a long time to help me with ArcView and I really benefited from this one. Here was my question and the responses I received: MapBlast (not to be confused with Mapquest) allows users to get lat/long coordinates simply by typing in an address. Obviously this is not accurate to engineering standards, but for my school project it will do. I am looking for ANY other way to get coordinate information (based on addresses) in a similar way. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- The best response for what I was looking for came from came from Kent Cook, followed closely by Eric Pyle (Listen up, Jack Maguire!). Also Phil Uhl's suggestion works even better for my current project because I need UTM coordinates and the site he recommended gives you that option. (many more options and more info, just not as fast). If you don't want to read further there are essentially two web sites that answer my question: geocode.com and terrafly.com The lat/long returned from these sites are not exactly the same, so accuracy is something I still need to check... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Phil Uhl: I got a notice for a site (www.terrafly.com) that allows you to bring up an aerial or satellite photo in an applet window. The control box that pops up with it has lat/long in it. I'm not sure they have very good photo coverage of the US yet. I've got some commercial map links on the website I do for the city of Provo, Utah. I'm not sure which ones might give you lat/long. I'll leave that up to you to find out. Try: http://lx1.provo.org/comdev/Maps/Maplinks/maplinks.html (This is a good site for links as well, thanks Phil!) Kent Cook & Matthew Stone: http://www.geocode.com/eagle.html-ssi (This is the direct link to the exact page - exactly what I was looking for. Input address, get immediate lat/long). Eric Pyle (TeleAtlas): What you are looking for is called geocoding. I gather from your posting that using the MapBlast site interactively is not suitable for your project. TeleAtlas North America offers 100 free geocodes for evaluation of our EZ-Locate geocoding service. You can download a Windows client, ArcView 3.x extension, or source code to use the service. The software can read addresses from a file or database and process them in batch mode, or interactively one at a time. For more than 100 addresses you'd have to pay. See http://www.geocode.com for details. We also have an interactive web geocoder for evaluation purposes. It can be found through the same web page. Todd Helt: You can also do this at Topozone (www.topozone.com), and I think they may also give you map coordinates. Jason Ramirez: http://tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapsurfer (These two didn't seem to have an actual address input....) Tanja Williamson: Try the Geographic Names Information Service (USGS). Mo Damian Spangrud (ESRI): There is a sample script in ArcView 3x that allows "reverse geocoding" if you have the streets to match to. Patrick Wratchford: For US addresses where you just need to quickly locate one address at a time, I suggest looking at Microsoft's MapPoint product. I have not exercised it extensively but have been very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the address data contained therein. It nailed several address locations that I needed in Juneau, Alaska for instance. Once you locate the address, tools are available to display the lat/lon under the cursor. It also exposes a COM interface if you wish to automate tasks. On the down side, the cartographic quality of the map display frankly sucks. From Bob Booth (ESRI): In ArcGIS, geocode the addresses and add the x,y coordinates of the point layer to a new field in the attribute table: (Optionally, start an edit session in ArcMap. Calculating a field is faster outside of an edit session, but you won't be able to undo the calculation. ) Open the attribute table of the layer of the layer you want to edit. Right-click the field heading for the X field (if there is no X field you can add a new field by clicking the Options button and selecting the new field option). Click Calculate Values. Check Advanced. Type the following VBA statement in the first text box. Dim dblX As Double Dim pPoint As IPoint Set pPoint = [Shape] dblX = pPoint.X Type the variable dblX in the text box directly under the X field name. Click OK. You can repeat the same process for updating a field with the y coordinates of each point in the layer. Tip The property X returns a field type of double. For best results, your X field should also be a double field type. -=-=-=- In AV 3.2, geocode the addresses, from the resulting points (might have to convert them to shapes, from events, first) use the add XY script (http://gis.esri.com/arcscripts/details.cfm?CFGRIDKEY=2124874557) to add the coordinates to the attribute table. -=-=-=- In Workstation ArcInfo, geocode the address, use the ADDXY arc command. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Also thanks to Michael Smith and Yew Yuan for their suggestions. John Tobin GIS Player