A common task within GIS is geocoding; the process of plotting postcodes within a GIS using an address locator. Cleaning the data for this process requires several steps. The format requires postcodes to be a length of 7 characters. This is easily achieved using the following formula in Excel:
=IF(LEN(A2) = 6,REPLACE(A2,3,1,MID(A2,3,1)&” “),IF(LEN(A2)=7,A2,IF(LEN(A2)=8,SUBSTITUTE(A2,” “,””))))
This works for postcodes of lengths 6,7 and 8. Other lengths can be added but it is rare you would encounter these. Save this as a csv file, ensuring the column has a header.
geospatial wandering 