Nearby places in Google Sheets
What is around each address: the nearest pharmacy, station or supermarket, or how many cafés are within a kilometre. Ask your AI in plain English: it reads Google Sheets, InstaMaps does the location work, and the results land in Google Sheets.
Google Sheets
InstaMapsNearby places
Google Sheets
Claude
ChatGPT
Copilot
GeminiThe prompt
Using the rows in this Google Sheet: <link to your sheet>, find the nearest pharmacy to each address and how far away it is, and write the results into the same sheet as new columns beside the rows.
Replace the parts in <angle brackets>.What comes back
- The nearest place of the kind you ask for, with its distance
- Or a count of places within a radius
- Anything that can't be placed or answered comes back with the reason. Nothing is dropped.
Set it up
Nearby places in Claude
Every plan, including Free. On Free, InstaMaps uses your one custom connector; Google Drive, Gmail and Google Calendar are directory connectors and don't count against it.
- In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors, and choose "Add custom connector".
- Name it InstaMaps and paste https://get-instamaps.com/mcp. Click Add.
- Click Connect and continue with Google. You land back in Claude, ready to ask.
- Paste the prompt above.
Before you start
Reading Google SheetsShare the sheet with InstaMaps, or set it to "anyone with the link can view". InstaMaps reads it straight from Google, so a sheet of thousands of rows is one call, and nothing passes through the chat.
Writing to Google SheetsInstaMaps writes to the sheet itself: share it with the address the answer gives you, as Editor. It adds new dated columns or a new tab, and never overwrites a cell.
Good to know
- Great Britain and the US, from OpenStreetMap. Everyday amenities are well covered; trades are patchier.
- The connector is free: 5,000 tool calls a day per person, and a whole sheet read by link counts as one call.
