What patient location information can I use?
The tool will work with any location that is recognised by Bing Maps. This could be a street/town name (Downing Street, London), a postcode (SW1A 2AA), or anything in between. In the UK, only postcodes can be used (for data protection reasons).
How should the spreadsheet be formatted?
The spreadsheet should have 2 columns with 1 patient per row. One column should contain identifiers (any combination of letters and numbers, not names); the results will be presented using these identifiers. The other column should contain locations (see above). You don't need to have column names in the spreadsheet, and if you do, skip them by settting first patient row to 2. There is a limit on how many patients can be handled at once (300 currently). This is an example with UK postcodes.
Some patients share the same address
Don't do anything differently; treat them as completely separate entries on the spreadsheet (one per row).
Is this site secure?
Though site uses HTTPS encryption for all requests, it's not guaranteed to be secure, and so you should not upload any data that is sensitive (eg names, dates of birth, exact addresses). No uploaded data is stored permanently.
I want to make clusters bigger than 25 patients
The limit on cluster size is imposed by Microsoft: it is very difficult to find the optimal route within a large cluster of points (this is the 'travelling salesman' problem). If you would like to have bigger clusters, you can use the colour-coded scatter plot included in the results to merge the clusters yourself (the numbers on the legend match up with the route numbers).
The clusters aren't all the same size
If the number of patients and the target cluster size don't divide perfectly, some clusters will come out smaller. If you want to minimise the number of small clusters, use the 'merge small clusters' option (this cannot remove small clusters completely).
The routes don't look very good
This site uses some approximations to keep the computations simple, so sometimes the results may be a compromise of what's possible.
How does Microsoft use the uploaded data?
Locations are uploaded to Microsoft Bing Maps API to place them on the map (patient identifiers are not), so you should check Microsoft's data policy.
I have a RuntimeError that mentions 'pandas.DataFrame' or similar
This is normally caused by a badly formatted spreadsheet. Check that there aren't any missing entries and all entries have the same data type.
Patient IDs are not unique
This means two or more patients in the spreadsheet share the same identifier. All identifiers must be unique.
Null values found in spreadsheet
This means there are empty/missing cells in the spreadsheet. All patients must have an ID and location.