How to check map accuracy of +15k location plots across the world, no lat/long info

[jscivias]

Hello, my data contains over 15,000 geographical locations (unfortunately no lat/long!) and it's been a real struggle trying to get as many locations to properly map in power bi. i've spent quite some time looking at workarounds, and it seems so far the 'best' option for me has been to combine all geographical columns (address, city, state/prov, zip code, country) into one column and plotting that. this was still giving me a lot of problems, so i eventually tried various combinations of aforementioned geo columns (e.g. city, state, country only, city, zip code, country only, etc. etc.), and so far the combination that gives me the least headache is the city, zip code, state, country combination. i've done some spot checks of filtering for individual countries to see if thre are still strange mappings (e.g. turkey being mapped to poland, etc.), but it's really laborious to go through every single country to do a visual check, or even to check whether some locations aren't being mapped at all. does anyone know if there's a way i can 'check' how many locations have been mapped in a map like below? i have 17,000 rows, and i'm trying to figure out how many of these blue dots have been plotted, and whether they have been correctly plotted. really appreciate any tips, i've been having so much trouble mapping world geo locations using bing map and no lat/long info. (this database is also not 'complete' in the sense that, for some countries, province column is missing, for others the zip code, etc etc.). thanks for your help! 

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

1. Make sure you have specified the right data category for your columns

2. Take your data , throw it against one of the geocoding APIs on the interwebs and see what sticks.