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Exporting Google Maps data to Excel or CSV

Getting listings out of Maps is half the job. The other half is a file that survives Excel's type-guessing, imports into a CRM without mangling phone numbers, and de-duplicates properly. Both halves, here.

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What Google gives you natively, and what it does not

Google Maps has no export button for search results. What exists natively: you can save individual places to a list and export your own saved lists via Google Takeout, and the paid Places API returns structured data under its own storage terms. Neither turns "dentist, Manchester" into a spreadsheet, which is the thing people actually mean by exporting Google Maps.

So the practical routes are the same as for extraction generally: by hand for small lists, or through a tool that writes CSV directly. This page assumes you have rows coming from somewhere and focuses on getting them into Excel, Sheets and your CRM without damage.

The columns worth exporting

Export everything the tool captures, even fields you have no immediate use for; re-running an extraction later costs more than carrying a column. The working set:

  • Business name, cleaned of trailing punctuation.
  • Phone, normalised to E.164 (see below, this one matters most).
  • Website URL, the key that unlocks email enrichment later.
  • Full address, plus latitude/longitude for territory work Excel can filter on.
  • Star rating and review count, your qualification columns.
  • Category and opening hours where published.
  • Place identifier, the only reliable de-duplication key.

The three traps that ruin spreadsheets

Trap 1: Excel eats phone numbers

Double-click a CSV and Excel guesses every column type. Phone numbers lose leading zeros and flip into scientific notation, silently, and the file saves back that way. Two fixes: import via Data > From Text/CSV and set the phone column to Text, or better, store numbers in E.164 format (+14155550123) so the leading + forces text treatment. E.164 is also what diallers and WhatsApp tooling expect, so normalising once at export solves three problems.

Trap 2: encoding

Metro business names are full of accents, apostrophes and non-Latin scripts. Keep the pipeline UTF-8 end to end, and when Excel garbles a known-good file, import through the text wizard and select UTF-8 rather than trusting the double-click path. Google Sheets handles UTF-8 CSVs correctly by default, which makes it the safer opener for a quick look.

Trap 3: duplicates that are not exact duplicates

Grid extraction produces overlap by design, and the same business rarely repeats character-for-character: "Smith & Sons Ltd" and "Smith and Sons" defeat Excel's Remove Duplicates. De-duplicate on the place identifier column, and as a second pass on the E.164 phone, which catches the same business listed under two names. Name-based deduping is the one that quietly ships duplicate rows to your sales team.

Into the CRM

  1. Clean first, import second: closed listings out, phones normalised, duplicates collapsed. Fixing data inside a CRM is ten times the work.
  2. Map rating and review count to custom fields; they are the segmentation everyone wishes they had after import.
  3. De-duplicate against existing records on phone during import; every metro you extract overlaps whatever your team already worked.
  4. Tag the import with the extraction date. Lists decay at 1-2% a month, and the date is what tells you when a refresh is due.

A note on Sheets vs Excel

For cleaning, Google Sheets is the gentler tool: correct UTF-8 handling, no type-mangling on open, and its Remove Duplicates respects a chosen key column. Excel wins for very large files (Sheets slows past a few hundred thousand cells) and Power Query pipelines. Many teams clean in Sheets and archive in CSV, which is a perfectly good workflow.

Frequently asked

Can Google Maps itself export to Excel?
Not search results. Google Maps lets you save places to lists and export your own saved lists through Google Takeout, but there is no built-in way to export the results of a search. Getting search results into a spreadsheet means copying by hand, using the paid Places API, or using an extraction tool.
CSV or XLSX, which should I use?
CSV for anything that will be imported into another system, because every CRM, dialler and sequencer accepts it and nothing proprietary can corrupt it. XLSX only for files a person will read directly, where formatting helps. If a tool offers both, export CSV and keep XLSX as a presentation format you generate from it.
Why do phone numbers break when I open the CSV in Excel?
Excel guesses column types on open and mangles anything phone-shaped: leading zeros vanish and long numbers become scientific notation. Import the file through Data > From Text/CSV and set the phone column to Text, rather than double-clicking the file. Better still, normalise numbers to E.164 (+447700900123) before import; the leading plus keeps Excel honest and diallers need that format anyway.
How do I import the export into my CRM?
Map columns once and save the mapping. Business name maps to company, the Maps category to industry, and rating and review count are worth keeping as custom fields because they are the best free qualification signal in the data. De-duplicate on phone number during import, since your CRM already contains some of any city you extract.
What encoding should the file use?
UTF-8. Business names carry accents and non-Latin characters in most metros, and a non-UTF-8 pipeline turns them into mojibake silently. If Excel shows garbled names on a file you know is UTF-8, use the CSV UTF-8 option when saving, or import through Data > From Text/CSV and pick 65001: Unicode (UTF-8).