Map View

Map View shows where the people in your directory are. It’s a third way to look at the Directory, alongside Card and Table: each place becomes a pin on a map showing how many people are there, and clicking a pin shows those people as the same cards you already know.

Map View is a preview feature and is available on the Plus plan. It works with the Directory only, not the Org Chart, and it isn’t shown in embedded views.

Before you start: a column with places in it

Map View needs at least one column in your Google Sheet that says where each person is. It can hold any of these:

• A place name: a city, a country, a state, a landmark or building name, or a full address, such as Nairobi, Kenya, Leeds, 221B Baker Street, London, or Bobst Library.
• Several columns that make up one place, for example City, State and Country. OrgNice joins them in the order shown and looks them up as one place (“Austin, Texas, United States”). Order matters. See Column order: most specific first below.
• Coordinates: latitude then longitude as decimal degrees, such as -1.2921, 36.8219. Hemisphere letters work too: 1.29°S, 36.82°E. Without letters, both numbers need a decimal point, so that 12 34 isn’t mistaken for a location.
• A Google Maps link: a full link, or a short maps.app.goo.gl link. Only Google Maps links are read; Apple Maps, Bing Maps and similar aren’t.

These are not places, and OrgNice won’t try to look them up on their own: bare numbers, phone numbers, and room, desk, floor or office codes (113, Room 113, B-204, 3F). A ZIP or postal code on its own falls in this category too, since structurally it looks the same as a phone number or a room number. See Add to each value below for how to make one work.

Columns that group people inside your organization, such as Region, District, Village or Department, are best kept as filters, not map locations. They describe where someone sits in your structure, not a place a map can find.

Setting up map views

Open Project Setup. Once your columns are mapped, a Map View section appears (on plans that include it).

A map view is a named choice of which column or columns place people on the map. You can set up to five per project, for example Office (a City and Country pair) and Site (a GPS column), and viewers can switch between them.

• If you use Auto-map, OrgNice looks at your headers and values and suggests map views for you. Check the suggestions, rename them, or remove ones you don’t want. A suggestion is only ever offered whole: if it turns out to name a column that isn’t actually mapped, the whole suggestion is dropped rather than kept with that column silently missing.
• Add Another Map View creates another. Give it a Name, then add columns with Add a column…. Any column in your data range can be used; it doesn’t have to be shown on the cards. A newly added column is inserted in a sensible position automatically (see below), not just tacked onto the end.
• Tick Default on one map view. That’s the one viewers see first.

Your map views are saved along with the rest of your column mapping.

Column order: most specific first

With several columns in one map view, the order you list them in isn’t cosmetic: it’s sent to the geocoder as one phrase, most specific first, the same way you’d write a postal address, with a building or place name, then City, then State or Province, then Country. Use the up and down buttons next to each column to arrange them this way.

This matters more than it looks like it should. Reversing the order doesn’t just make a lookup less precise: it can make it fail to resolve at all. For example, Kimmel Center, New York, United States resolves correctly, but New York, United States, Kimmel Center comes back not found, even though it’s the exact same three values. When you add a column back to a view after removing it, OrgNice inserts it in the right position automatically (a building-like column leads; a recognized City/State/Country column slots in among the others by rank), but if you ever see a place stop resolving after editing a map view, check the column order first.

Add to each value: completing an under-specified column

Each map view has an optional Add to each value field. Whatever you type there is appended to every row’s value before it’s looked up, so if your column just holds a building name that isn’t unique on its own, you can add the context that makes it unique without adding another column to your sheet.

Use it when:

• Everyone in this view is in the same place, and the column’s value alone doesn’t say enough to find it. A building or campus location name is the most common case: many organizations have a “Building 1” or a landmark name that also exists, coincidentally, somewhere else in the world.
• A column is otherwise-valid but ambiguous on its own, such as a 2-letter state or region code, which can collide with something else entirely: CA alone can resolve to Canada, and WA to Western Australia, not the US states they were meant to mean. Adding , USA fixes both.
• A column holds only a ZIP or postal code. On its own, a bare code like 94103 isn’t attempted at all (see above); with USA (or your country) added, it becomes 94103, USA and resolves normally.

Examples:

If people in this view are spread across different cities or countries, this isn’t the right tool. A single piece of added context applies to every row alike, so it can’t tell two different cities apart. Add City and/or Country as their own columns instead, and let OrgNice join them per row.

One thing context can’t rescue: a room, desk, floor or building-internal code (Room 113, Suite 400, Building 3) stays unresolved even with context added. These aren’t places a map can find no matter what surrounds them; use the specific building’s proper name, or a full street address, instead.

Using the map

In the Directory, choose the Map button in the layout toggle (next to Card and Table).

• Pins show how many people are at a place. Nearby pins group into a cluster showing the total; zoom in, or use Zoom to these places, to spread them out.
• Click a pin or cluster to open a list of the people there, as the same cards used in the Card view. Click a card to open that person’s profile. The pin for the profile you have open is ringed, so you can always see where they are.
• Click empty map space to close whatever’s open and get the full map back. This never closes a person’s profile, only the pin’s list, so you don’t lose track of who you were viewing.
• All places (in the bar above the map) lists every place, so you can jump straight to one without hunting for it on the map.
• Search works on the map the same way as on the cards: only the pins that still have someone in them stay.
• Layers carry over. If a Layer colors people’s cards by department, the pins are colored the same way; a place with people from several departments is shown split between their colors.
• Map view: if the project has more than one, choose between them here. The link button next to it copies a link that opens straight to that map view, to share or bookmark.

The status line above the map tells you what you’re looking at: how many people are shown, in how many places, and how many can’t be shown.

People who aren’t on the map

A Not on the map list appears when some people can’t be placed. It groups them by reason and shows them as cards. Everyone who can view the directory sees this list, so a missing pin is never a mystery.

If most people in a map view can’t be placed, OrgNice shows a warning above the map. It usually means the column doesn’t hold places.

A confident wrong match is possible: check a few pins after setup

Most of the time, a place that can’t be found lands safely in the “Not on the map” list above, with a clear reason. But a place name that’s ambiguous (one that happens to share a name with somewhere else in the world) can come back confidently resolved to the wrong location, with no warning at all, because as far as the geocoder is concerned, it found exactly what was asked for.

This is real, not a hypothetical edge case: in testing, a specific university building name resolved to a location in another country entirely when looked up on its own, and a 2-letter state code resolved to the wrong country (see Add to each value above for the state-code case). It’s more likely the less specific or the more generic a value is: a single building name, a short code, a common place name with no region attached.

What helps:

• Add City and/or Country (as extra columns, or via Add to each value) whenever a value on its own could plausibly mean more than one thing.
• After setting up a new map view, spot-check a handful of pins: click through and confirm they land where you expect, especially for anyone at a distinctive or unusual site.
• Sub-building detail, such as a specific platform, gate, or loading dock, usually isn’t independently mapped even when the parent building or station is. Don’t expect a map view to resolve down to that level of granularity; use the building, station, or airport itself.

How places are found

OrgNice looks places up in the background the first time it sees them. A large sheet with many different places can take a few minutes to fill in; you’ll see “Still looking up N locations” and the map updates itself as places arrive. It checks for a few minutes and then stops; reload the page to continue. Each distinct place is looked up once and remembered, so later visits are instant, and people who share a place share a pin.

Place names are turned into map positions by a geocoding service (Nominatim, which searches OpenStreetMap data). Coordinates need no lookup at all.

Keyboard and screen readers

The map is fully usable without a mouse.

• Tab moves into the map. Only one place is a tab stop, so the map never traps you.
• Arrow keys move between places. Home and End jump to the first and last.
• Enter or Space opens the people at a place.
• Escape moves focus back rather than closing things: from a card to the list it came from, and (once nothing in the list is still open) from the list back to the map. An open profile is never closed by Escape; it stays open until you close it yourself, so you don’t lose track of who you were viewing.
• + and − zoom, and the arrow keys pan when the map itself has focus.
• Every place is announced with its name and how many people are there (“Nairobi, Kenya, 3 people”), and a cluster is announced with how many places and people it holds. The All places list and the Not on the map list work without using the map at all.

Privacy

Anyone who can view your Directory can see the Map view, and every pin shows where people are. If your location column holds home addresses, those show on the map. Use a city or office location if that isn’t what you want.

Place names, including full addresses if that’s what your column holds, are sent to the geocoding service to be looked up, and the result is stored so it doesn’t need looking up again. If a map view has Add to each value set, that text is sent along with each row’s value too, as part of the same combined query. See For IT & Security for exactly what is sent and stored.

Credits

The map is drawn with Leaflet, using map tiles from CARTO and map data from OpenStreetMap contributors. The credit stays visible on the map itself. See Credits & attributions.