Visualize route in map

Question

Hi,
As beginner, I try to gain understanding of 'ArcGIS for Excel' capabilities. I cannot find clues in the help-chapters, why I hope for advice from this forum.
I have created a template with excel cells for geographical addresses (from; to) and manage to get them nice presented in the map as points. I also have the "findroute" function to reply in cells below with trucking time & distance, using what is refferred to as "best route".
Finally I want that route to be visualized in the map, between the two location points, but I cannot find how to put this into the map from the excel interface. It should be a simple thing, so I guess that its a beginner-trouble...?
BR/Andreas

ShannonCardoza · Answer

You're welcome 😊 I did chat with my team on this and we have an existing enhancement request for this workflow so we will see what we can do to make this feature available in an upcoming release of ArcGIS for Excel.

Stay tuned....

SC

AndreasT · Answer

Dear Shannon,

Thank you very much for your kind support. I think this made it clear 🙂
I have earlier created logics in Excel to support calculations of time and costs in transport groupage networks. Those are a bit easier to deal with, since they have defined "legs" in the networks. But for partloads or fulloads, its more of a matter of driving range (incl concerns on drivers rest-time etc). For this, I first made a simple setup with local distance tables (zipzone-zipzone), but in order to facilitate the model I started using the 'ArcGIS for Excel' formula to get distances. 
If the defined route (preferable with border crossing coordinates) would have been visualised, it would have been just perfect: Both to make it more visual, and in addition to support further calculations of e.g. costs from EU mobility package (trigging costs depending on driving time per country).

I am starting to get familiar with ArcGIS online, but it would have been so nice to keep my model within excel environment 🙂

Once again, thank you very much!

Best regards,
Andreas Thieme, Sweden

ShannonCardoza · Answer

Hi there @AndreasT,

Thank you for reaching out! That is quite the workflow for a 'beginner'. Nice job. 🤗  So the end goal here is to map the different routes you created?

If so, I do not believe this is possible in ArcGIS for Excel. We can map point features, so our start point and even end point but to do so I would suggest incorporating ArcGIS Online, once you have a feature layer, we should be able to add this ArcGIS layer in Excel. Here is the online documentation. But please feel free to elaborate on your current workflow and even share example data and I can see what we can come up with further.

All the best,

SC