SharePoint Location Columns – Too Meh for Recommendation

SharePoint Location columns have some issues which are pervasive and repeatable. One of the purportedly biggest benefits of using one of these columns is we can type in an address, and it’s looked up in Bing Maps. What’s supposed to happen is the details of that location are then parsed out and made available for use as separate “pseudo-columns”. For example, we might type in ‘111 Coleman Blvd, Savan’ and then select the corresponding location.

Then in the list where we have the column, we can choose to display the City, State, Postal Code, etc. without ever entering them.

All well and good. Many addresses, though, come back with missing parts of their data. In this case, there is no latitude/longitude, which we’d like to have for mapping. This is one if the big benefits of using a Location column! There’s no way to discern in the UI whether the variants one might see for an address is “better” than another. In this case, choosing ‘111 Coleman Blvd, Pooler, GA 31408’, which is the exact same building, yields the latitude/longitude.

But there’s no way in the UI to discern this as we are making the selection. I can only figure it out if I go to the Bing Maps UI and look for the latitude/longitude at the bottom of the left panel.

Alas, my excitement at realizing this variant on the address has a lat/long was short-lived, as the values are not pulled into the list on selection.

As you can see below, even though I have selected an address which has all the values in Bing Maps, only a few of the pseudo-columns are populated. The lat/long are missing as well as the Postal Code.

It’s also very easy to “select” a value which isn’t even coming from Bing Maps. In other words, I can type ‘111 Coleman Blvd’ and hit enter, and that value is stored in the column with no warning that it isn’t “connected” to Bing Maps. Or, even worse, one of the values from the dropdown is selected, and may well be wrong. Here, I’ve mistakenly typed ‘1111 Coleman Blvd’ and I just get that untethered value and there’s nothing in the UI to make that clear. (Yes, the second line is blank, but you only see that if you edit the column.)

Another small annoyance is once an address is selected, we can’t copy it from the field in edit mode. We can’t highlight the address anywhere in the UI I can find. So, if we want to grab that address, there’s no way to do so.

And so forth…

What’s your luck been with Location columns? Do you find you consistently get valid – and useful – data back from Bing Maps?