Someone might ask 'What is geo-coding?'...that is the process of determining the latitude and longitude coordinates for a physical address. You might have a table of your customers' addresses (see a sample of such a table below), and you want to plot those locations on a map. You can create a map of those locations using AWhere, BUT first, you will need to geo-code each address (give each physical address a lat/long coordinate), because that geo-coding output is what AWhere will need in order to import a table of addresses to create a map of the locations. There are several websites that provide free geo-coding tools...an example is www.batchgeocode.com . Follow the instructions on that website to geo-code a table of addresses, which will result in a new table containing your original input addresses, plus two new columns (fields) in the table containing the lat and long coordinates*. You will then use the 'Import Coordinates' add-in (mentioned in the initial post of this forum thread) to import that table of lat/longs to create a new point map layer in AWhere showing the plotted locations of all of those addresses.
(Note that for those zip codes in the table below that only have 4-digits, it is understood that there is a leading '0' before those...making it a standard 5-digit zip code.)
Geo-Coding addresses outside of the U.S. - If your addresses are outside of the U.S., you would want to add one more field to your table...a 'Country' field. Though, do note that if you are using batchgeocode.com to geo-code addresses in locations outside of the U.S., Canada, or Western Europe, note that you will not likely be able to geo-code down to the street-level, as geo-coding at that precision is not yet available in parts of the world outside of those three regions. So, the lat/long that is reported back to you for addresses outside of those regions will be just the center of the city, at best...not actual 'on-the-ground' locations. See the note about 'Data Coverage' near the bottom of the 'batchgeocode.com' homepage for more on that.
*Tip: before you import (into AWhere) the table of lat/longs (the output from the geo-coding process), you might want to rename the default named lat and long fields to 'Latitude' and 'Longitude', respectively. The default names that 'batchgeocode.com' gives to those columns ('bg_lat' and 'bg_long', respectively) will not be recognized by the AWhere Import Coordinates add-in as the fields representing latitude and longitude...but if you name them 'Latitude' and 'Longitude' (or 'Lat' and 'Long' will work, too)...AWhere will automatically recognize them (this is what Curt was referring to above when he said to be sure to name the fields in your spreadsheet to 'Latitude' and 'Longitude').