Geographic Midpoint Help

There are three methods for selecting cities, towns and other geographic locations in the Geographic Midpoint Calculator. Below is a description of how to use each method.

A. Select Cities From a List.

  1. Select one of six regions: US and Canada, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and Caribbean or Australia, NZ and Pacific.
  2. Select the country or state/province.
  3. Select your desired city from the cities box.
  4. Enter the Time in city in any combination of years, months and days (optional). This can be the time that you have lived in the city. Note that if you enter a time for any city then you must enter a time for all of the cities in the Your Places list.
  5. Click on the Add city to Your Places button. Every time you add a city to Your Places, the latitude and longitude of the geographic midpoint will be automatically calculated and displayed in the Midpoint box for the cities that are currently in the list. The latitude and longitude are displayed in both degrees minutes seconds format and decimal degrees format.
  6. Repeat steps 1-5 to add additional cities to Your Places.
  7. Click on the See it on map button to view the midpoint on a map provided by Google Maps. By default, the map page will be displayed in a new window so that you can close the map page after viewing it and return to the main page without losing the data that you have entered into the calculator in the event you want to make additions or changes.

B. Search for Place

Note: You must be connected to the Internet while using this search feature.
  1. Select Search for place from the Region box.
  2. In the Search for place edit box type the name of the city or town and country/state separated by a comma, for example: Rome, Italy or Dallas, TX. In the US, Canada and other selected countries you can specify a street address such as: 350 Fifth Ave, New York, NY
  3. Click on the Find it button, and the search results will be displayed. If more than one search result is found, select the location that you desire. If no search result is found or you don't want to use the search results you can clear the search results by clicking on the Search for place box then search for another location.
  4. Enter Time in city (optional).
  5. Click on Add city to Your Places.
  6. Repeat steps 2-5 to add additional locations to the list.
  7. Click on See it on map.

C. Specify Latitude and Longitude

  1. Select Specify latitude and longitude from the Region box.
  2. Enter the latitude and longitude into the latitude and longitude boxes using one of the allowed formats, or as an alternative see Importing multiple latitude/longitude data
  3. Enter Time in city (optional).
  4. Click on Add location to Your Places.
  5. Repeat steps 2-4 to add additional locations to the list.
  6. Click on See it on map.

Notes

You can use any combination of the above three methods when specifying locations for the calculator.

Importing multiple latitude/longitude data into the calculator

You can import multiple latitude/longitude data from another source into the calculator. In an Excel spreadsheet, copy a column of latitude data and paste it into the calculator's Latitude box, then copy the corresponding column of longitude data and paste it into the Longitude box.

You can also copy a list of latitude data from your word processor or Notepad as long as each latitude is on a separate line, then paste it into the calculator's Latitude box. then copy and paste the corresponding longitudes. In all cases, the total number of latitudes pasted and longitudes pasted must be the same. You can see the pasted data by scrolling the boxes upward. Add the locations to Your Places before pasting additional data. If you have pasted several hundred (or even thousands) of latitude/longitude coordinates, the calculator may take several seconds to calculate the geographic midpoint.

Calculation methods

The calculator provides you three Calculation methods for performing the final midpoint calculation: geographic midpoint, center of distance and average latitude/longitude. There are differences between the three methods and reasons for choosing one method over another.

Keyboard shortcuts

These shortcut keys are available in Internet Explorer. For Mozilla Firefox, add the shift key to the key combinations listed below.

Key Description
alt + r Move to region
alt + s Move to state or province
alt + o Move to country
alt + c Move to city
alt + p Move to Your Places
alt + g Move to search for place
alt + l Move to latitude
alt + y Move to years
alt + i Add city to Your Places
alt + x Remove place
alt + 0 (zero) Clear list
alt + m move to midpoint results

Hint: Press the first letter of the state, province, country or city to move quickly to the appropriate part of a list. This is particularly useful in lists that have many cities.

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