A Plus Code like 772CH947+CV is a complete, precise address. Google created the system (formally, Open Location Codes) for the majority of the world's buildings that have no reliable street address, and it has quietly become the working address format for delivery teams, field crews and small distributors across Latin America, Africa and South Asia. WhatsApp a Plus Code and the recipient can navigate to a 14-metre square.
The trouble starts when those codes meet a spreadsheet. Paste a column of Plus Codes into most geocoding tools and you get errors, blanks, or, worst of all, every pin stacked on the city centre because the geocoder matched the town name and ignored the code. Teams conclude their data is broken and start manually stripping the + symbols, which does not help.
This guide covers how Plus Codes actually work, why most geocoders mishandle them, and how to convert a whole column of them to coordinates and a live route map from inside Google Sheets, with formulas rather than scripts.
- →Plus Codes (Open Location Codes) are Google's free address system for places without reliable street addresses — used across Latin America, Africa, India and rural areas everywhere.
- →Most geocoders reject Plus Codes outright or silently return the city centre instead of the actual location, which quietly ruins delivery routes and customer maps.
- →In Google Sheets, =GEOCODE(A2) with the InstaMaps add-on converts both full codes (772CH947+CV) and short codes with a locality (H963+HV Maracaibo) to exact coordinates.
- →Full Plus Codes are pure maths: they decode to coordinates without any lookup, so conversion is instant and never rate-limited.
- →One formula chain takes a column of Plus Codes to a shareable live map: =GEOCODE for coordinates, =INSTAMAP for the map, =VISIT_ORDER for the route.
- →Do not strip the + symbol or reformat the codes — a correct geocoder should accept them exactly as your team writes them.
What Plus Codes Are (and Why Your Team Might Already Use Them)
A Plus Code encodes latitude and longitude into a short string of letters and digits. A full code such as 772CH947+CV identifies a grid cell roughly 14 metres square anywhere on Earth. A short code such as H963+HV Maracaibo drops the regional prefix and relies on the town name to anchor it, easier to say aloud, print on a delivery note, or send in a chat message.
The format was designed for places where street addressing is incomplete: informal settlements, new developments, rural routes, markets. In cities like Maracaibo, Lagos or Kolkata, a field team's client list is often a spreadsheet where the address column is Plus Codes plus a reference point ('on the street of the clinical hospital'). That is not messy data, it is the correct local addressing system, and tools should meet it where it is.
If your operation runs on Google Maps, you already have Plus Codes: they appear on every place card. Tapping a dropped pin shows its code, which is exactly how field teams capture new client locations without any special equipment.
Why Most Geocoders Get Plus Codes Wrong
Geocoding services are trained on street addresses, so a Plus Code confuses them in one of three ways. Some reject the input outright and return an error. Some URL-decode the + into a space before processing, so H963+HV arrives as H963 HV and matches nothing. The most dangerous failure is partial matching: the geocoder ignores the code, matches the town name, and confidently returns the city-centre coordinates, so all thirty of your delivery stops render as one stack of pins in the middle of town.
The stacked-pin failure is worth checking for in any tool you evaluate: geocode two different Plus Codes from the same city and confirm you get two different coordinate pairs. If you get identical results, the tool is matching the locality and discarding the code.
The irony is that full Plus Codes do not need a geocoding service at all. The format is an open algorithm: the code itself contains the coordinates, and decoding it is arithmetic. A well-built geocoder decodes full codes locally (instantly, with no lookup quota) and only consults its index for the locality portion of short codes.
Converting Plus Codes in Google Sheets: the Formula Walkthrough
With the InstaMaps add-on installed (free, from the Google Workspace Marketplace), conversion is one formula. If column A holds your codes, full or short, then =GEOCODE(A2) returns the coordinates, and =GEOCODE(A2:A30) fills the whole column in one call. Both of these work as-is: 772CH947+CV and H963+HV Maracaibo, Zulia. Keep the + symbols; keep the locality text on short codes.
From coordinates, the useful outputs are one formula each. =INSTAMAP(A2:B30, "Client visits") returns a link to a live, shareable map of every code. =VISIT_ORDER(B2:B30) sequences the stops into an efficient visiting order for the day. =ROUTE_LINK(A2:A12) turns up to eleven stops into a Google Maps navigation link a driver can tap on a phone.
For one-off jobs or very large lists, the free InstaMaps geocoder tool accepts pasted Plus Codes the same way, paste the column, download the coordinates as CSV. No sign-up for the first hundred rows.
One practical tip for short codes: include the town exactly as locals write it. The geocoder resolves the locality first and then recovers the code's dropped prefix from it, so 'H963+HV Maracaibo' and 'H963+HV Maracaibo, Zulia' both work, but a bare 'H963+HV' cannot be located without knowing which city it belongs to.
From a Column of Codes to a Route Your Crew Can Run
Distribution teams that run on Plus Codes tend to share a daily shape: a master client list in a spreadsheet, routes assigned by zone, a printed visit list per driver, and results typed back into the sheet at day's end. Every step of that is automatable from the same sheet once the codes geocode correctly.
The chain looks like this: =GEOCODE converts the codes, =VISIT_ORDER sequences the day, =INSTAMAP publishes the live map with a tab per route, and the map's run sheet button produces a printable, checkbox-ready visit list per driver, with a QR code that opens the same list on a phone, where drivers can tap stops as done and the results flow back into the spreadsheet via =LOGBOOK.
The point is not any single formula. It is that a Plus Code column, the format your team already uses because it is what works locally, is a first-class input to the whole workflow, not a data-cleaning problem to apologise for.
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Common Questions
Yes, geocode it to coordinates first, then reverse-geocode. But if the location had a reliable street address, it probably would not be using a Plus Code; treat the code as the canonical address and the street description as a human-friendly note.
No. Plus Codes are an open, free standard from Google with no licensing; What3Words is proprietary. Plus Codes also degrade gracefully, a shorter code is a bigger area, not gibberish.
The standard 10-character code (like 772CH947+CV) identifies a cell of roughly 14 by 14 metres, building-level. An 11th character refines it to about 3 metres.
No. They are pure geometry, permanently stable, and work offline once decoded.
Install the free InstaMaps add-on for Google Sheets, type =GEOCODE on your Plus Code column, and turn the whole list into a live route map your crew can run.
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