Office Hours Question from Richard: "Why are ...

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
1

Office Hours Question from Richard: “Why are you storing latitude and longitude in addition to the LatLong field?”

In this case, the location data we had was separated into two columns AND we had a combined LatLong column.

In most cases, you might have just separated columns for latitude and longitude - when you connect that table to AppSheet, the platform will automatically try to combine related columns (like Lat/Long or First Name/Last Name), and so a ‘LatLong’ field is generated as a single, virtual column. That LatLong column is what you’ll be able to use in a map, or for calculating distances.

Thanks for the Aliens reference, Rich!

2

I love Ripley the cat. He was the real star of the movie!

I thought I saw in the demo that your Google Sheet had three distinct columns (latitude, longitude and LatLong). We like to capture location data through Appsheet and have switched from separated latitude longitude columns to the singular LatLong column. I assumed there wasn’t

an easy way to capture LatLong points and split them up into separate columns. Also I didn’t want three columns because that breaks data normalization.