Travel Mapper FAQ

Jin - June 26, 2022

Here are frequently asked questions to help you with Travel Mapper, the Travel Mapper Google Sheets Add-on and the Travel Mapper Chrome Extension.
Helpful videos:

Getting Started

🤔 What’s the difference between Travel Mapper, the Google Sheets Add-on, and the Chrome Extension?

Think of all three as tools you can use together to plan the perfect itinerary faster. All three use your Google Sheet as the foundation for documenting your itinerary, but each can be used to help in different ways:
  • Travel Mapper - fastest and largest interface for editing your trip in the drag-n-drop view, full-screen map of your itinerary, emailing your trip summary, and exporting for Google My Maps. The web app supports trip editing on mobile devices. Start planning right on blueplanit.co.
  • Travel Mapper Google Sheets Add-on - best for spreadsheet fans. The add-on includes all the functionality of the Travel Mapper web app with the addition of an integrated map view on the side. It's also great for bulk adding places to your itinerary but there's no editing on mobile devices. This is for use within Google Sheets.
  • Travel Mapper Chrome Extension - enables easily adding any activities or places to your Google Sheets itinerary right from any website. Anything you add will show on both Travel Mapper and Travel Mapper Sheets Add-on.

Travel Mapper

🤔 Can I use Travel Mapper on my mobile device?

  • Yes, you can log in on your mobile device's browser to edit your trip.
  • You can view your trip spreadsheet using the Google Sheets mobile app.
  • You can email your trip summary to yourself for a summary view of your trip on mobile or import your itinerary to Google My Maps for mobile use.

🤔 How do I manage my Travel Mapper subscription?

🤔 How do I import my itinerary to Google My Maps?

  • Click on the Edit Trip button from the side-bar map. Click on the download icon on the left of the new window that opens. Click Download.
  • Open Google My Maps, create a new map, and click "Import" under the first map layer. Select the KML file exported from Travel Mapper to upload.

🤔 Why did Travel Mapper export multiple files for Google My Maps?

  • Google My Maps only allows up to 10 layers.
  • Each day on your itinerary is its own layer so that the pins are unique to each day. This makes it easier to see which pins correspond to which days on the map.
  • For itineraries longer than 10 days, multiple KML files are created to enable importing your full itinerary into multiple maps within Google My Maps. For example, days 1 through 10 on map 1. Days 11-20 on map 2, etc.
  • In addition to the multiple KML files separated by days, one last KML file is created with all your itinerary activities as one layer.

Travel Mapper Sheets Add-on

🤔 How do I start?

  • Create a new spreadsheet and find Generate Template in the menu shown below.

🤔 Only Help is visible in the Travel Mapper menu.

  • This is a known Google Sheets issue, independent of Travel Mapper, that requires a fix from Google.
  • Wait for 10 seconds and reload the browser page by pressing the Ctrl+R. If the problem persists, please contact us at admin@blueplanit.co

🤔 I can't generate a template.

  • If you see “Uh oh! You are experiencing a permissions issue related to having multiple Google accounts” error, this is caused by having a Google Chrome account signed in that is different from your Google Sheets account you used to install Travel Mapper. This is a known Google platform error existing since 2017 and is not associated with Travel Mapper. Three options to fix this:
  • See the support page for step-by-step instructions on fixing this issue.
  • Use the Guest account in your Chrome browser and sign into Sheets to use Travel Mapper.
  • Install Travel Mapper on the account signed into Chrome.
  • Change your Chrome account to the one used to install Travel Mapper

🤔 Where is the map?

  • From the "Extensions" dropdown menu, select "Travel Mapper" and then "View Map".

🤔 Can I customize the "Category" options and the map pin color for each activity?

  • Yes! Add as many category labels as you want. The color on the map marker corresponds to the cell background color of the category in the spreadsheet. See this YouTube video for help.
  • You can use conditional formatting in your Google Sheet to color the background automatically based on the category text.

🤔 My spreadsheet and map are too zoomed in. How can I zoom out to see more of my spreadsheet and itinerary?

🤔 Can I make the sidebar map bigger?

  • You cannot make the map wider, but you can make it fullscreen with button in the top right corner of the map. There's also a larger map in the modal view. Click "Edit Trip" to view that modal.

🤔 Why am I seeing "Your region has unsupported date formats."?

  • Some regions have a known Google Sheets bug that affects the add-on's ability to process certain date and number formats. Right now this is limited to 2 unsupported regions.
  • Travel Mapper will automatically fix this issue for you when using any of our premium features by switching the sheet locale to the U.S.
  • To manually set your sheet locale settings, follow this post. If you changed your sheet locale for any reason, please generate a NEW template (see question 1).

🤔 Is there any way to highlight the itinerary activity from the map?

  • Clicking a map marker will highlight the row in the spreadsheet that corresponds to that place on the map.

Travel Mapper Chrome Extension

🤔 Does the extension work on all browsers?

  • The Chrome Extension is only designed to work on Google Chrome.

🤔 When I created my Google Sheet itinerary with the extension, the itinerary template was not created and I had a blank sheet.

  • This can happen if the Google account logged in in your Chrome browser is different from the account that you signed into the Travel Mapper extension with. To fix this, follow the answer to the question below and sign in with the same Google account that is logged in in your Chrome browser.
  • Once the accounts are consistent, try creating the itinerary sheet again. You should see the itinerary tab with a proper template created.

🤔 I signed in with the wrong Google account. How do I change my Google account in the extension?

  • Follow these steps to sign out and sign into the Travel Mapper Chrome Extension with another Google account.
1) First, sign out of the extension using the extension popup like this:
2) Now, do not sign back in yet. You can close the popup. Then, go to your Google account's connections. You can see Google's official help page on how to manage third party connections to your account.
3) Once you're in your connections, scroll down to where it says Blue Planit (Travel Mapper) and click it.
4) If you also have the Travel Mapper Google Sheets Add-on, you will see an instance that says "Travel Mapper". Disregard that one, and make sure to disconnect the one that says "Blue Planit (Travel Mapper)". Ensure the permissions look like this and then you can delete the connection and remove access from this Google account:
5) Now, you can open up the extension popup again and sign in with the account that you want. Make sure you allow all the permissions like so:

🤔 How do I pin the Chrome Extension to my browser bar for easy access?

  • Follow this tutorial to pin the Travel Mapper Chrome Extension in Google Chrome.

Spreadsheet Questions

🤔 Can I change the sheet tabs or titles?

  • No. Changing the titles will break Travel Mapper functionality, but there are no problems when adding additional tabs.

🤔 Can I add or delete columns or rows on the Itinerary tab?

  • No. The add-on only works properly with the columns that are generated from the add-on. Adding or deleting rows may have unintended consequences because the format of the template is hard-coded and certain cells (like the "Destination" and "Budget" cells) cannot be move or removed for Travel Mapper to work properly.

🤔 What is the “Backdoor Data” tab and can I delete it?

  • No, this is where all the automation magic happens. However, you are welcome to hide this tab.

🤔 How do I use the "Location" column?

  • If an activity isn’t mapped correctly after clicking "Update Map" with the "Location" column left blank, enter the correct address in the "Location" cell to correctly map the activity location.

🤔 What is the "Do Not Map" option in the "Location" column for?

  • Select “Do Not Map” for any activity entries that you don’t want to show on the map.

🤔 Why am I getting an "Invalid" error message in the Location column?

  • You can ignore this. It is a byproduct of having the "Do Not Map" dropdown option.

🤔 How to I recover lost data from my Sheet?

🤔 Can I use the "Replace URL with title" function in Google Sheets for links in the Link column?

  • No, cells in the Link column need to be formatted as the URL itself rather than the title that Google Sheets offers to replace the URL with. Without the URL itself, the link will eventually be broken and you'll be unable to click the link from the Email Summary sent with Travel Mapper. Always use the URL itself for the Link column.

🤔 How do I manage activities without dates and assign them dates without inserting rows?

  • One option is add the activity to an open row using Add Place or by typing it in and leave the date blank for that activity. When you're ready to assign it a date, open Edit Trip (see this video) to drag it into the desired date. This will automatically format the itinerary in date order (be sure to click Save).
  • If you already have the Activities Without Dates column in the Edit Trip view, you can click Add Place there to add additional activities. If you don't have this column because all your activities have dates, click More Info on any activity in the Edit Trip view and click the X in the bottom left of the activity to remove its date.

Reach out to admin@blueplanit.co for any other questions!