Help with creation

Looks like that will be a tough one. I hunted around for locations and almost came up empty. I finally found a site that had a list of them at http://www.dwinsider.com/store-locator/

I couldn't find any current POI's for them so you've got your work cut out for you. If you really want to create a POI for them you will need to go through each location individually using each address with the services of www.geocoder.us and then paste the results into a spreadsheet program. Once you have all of your data, save the file as a MS csv formatted file. Wha la Disney Store POI.

Example...

On the dwinsider.com site I went to Alabama, then chose birmingham, there is the address for that store.

Disney Store

Address: 2000 Riverchase Galleria, Birmingham, Alabama, 35244-2341
Phone: (205) 988-3911
Zip Code: 35244-2341
Web Site Address: www.disneystore.com

I copied the address only and pasted it into a second browser (or tab for tabbed browsers) set on geocoder.us and then submitted. Here's the output...

Address 2000 Riverchase Galleria
Hoover AL 35244
(33.375834, -86.808145)

Latitude 33.375834 °
N 33 ° 22' 33.0"
33 ° 22.5500' (degree m.mmmm)

Longitude -86.808145 °
W 86 ° 48' 29.3"
-86 ° 48.4887' (degree m.mmmm)

You now have the coordinate info for the store location (33.375834, -86.808145)

Copy the Longitude into the 1st column of your spreadsheet, the latitude in the second, and perhaps the regular store address and phone number into the 3rd column. There you have it. The 1st line of your POI! Then just keep on going that way filling in each successive row in your spreadsheet. You can save your spreadsheet in its native format until you have all of your information done. When done entering all of your info and you're ready to save it into a usable csv file, choose "Save as", select the location that you want it on your hard drive and set the filetype to MS CSV (Microsoft and Apple CSV Formats are different)and name the file. Click OK or Save. Your done!

The worst part is going to be converting the addresses to coordinates and pasting them into your spreadsheet. It's going to be time consuming.

Good luck!

PS: The site I mentioned only covers the US. IF you want International ones too, search engines are wonderful things. And, just for giggles, if you paste those coordinates into Google Earth, it will show you exactly where the store is.

...to not have to geocode each location individually - it can be done in batch from a csv file - that's how I made my version of the NPR station list...started with a station list in pdf format from the NPR web site - copied the text to clipboard, pasted it into Excel, batch geocoded it, and then tweaked it into final form - took less than 3 hours to do.

How do you batch geocode?

http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/convert?form=address or
http://www.batchgeocode.com/

Check out the fine print on the sites for their restrictions/requests about their use...I would not do a file containing thousands of things at once...

Thank you all so much! You have been very helpfull. I have done most of the work now and decided to create a different POI file for each of the states that I am likely to travel in. I also have made one for Apple stores as well (those are for me). I will post them on this site when I am done, and again, thank you very much I am truely greatfull for you helping out a beginer to this stuff:)

"D"

I have refined it a little bit now. I am using a Google search for the address, then putting the address into Google Earth set to use Degree coords. (38.12345, -77.12345) and Put that right into a CSV file with a description.
I am simply amazed at technology some times.

"D"