Acuris Validate for Excel

1Install

Acuris Validate for Excel is an Office task-pane add-in for Excel on the web, Excel for Windows (Microsoft 365) and Excel for Mac (Microsoft 365). You add it from the Office store in about a minute — the steps are the same on all three.

Requirements. A Microsoft 365 subscription (Excel 2016+ with Office.js support; Excel on the web works with any Microsoft account) and outbound HTTPS access to api.acuris-geo.com and paf.acuris-geo.com. If installation fails, see Troubleshooting.

Install from the store ~1 minute

Add it from inside Excel — identical on Excel for the web, Windows and Mac:

In Excel, open Home → Add-ins (on older versions this is under Insert → Add-ins or Get Add-ins).
Search for Acuris Validate for Excel.
Click Add. The Validate button appears on the Home tab of the ribbon — click it to open the task pane.

Don't see it after adding? Restart Excel — store add-ins appear on the Home ribbon (on Excel for the web, reopen the workbook). If your organisation manages Office add-ins, an admin may need to approve it first.

Whole team (IT-managed). A Microsoft 365 administrator can push Acuris Validate to everyone from the Microsoft 365 admin center → Settings → Integrated apps (Centralized Deployment of the store app). Users in the selected groups get the Validate button automatically — no per-person setup. Newly deployed store add-ins can take up to 24 hours to appear for managed users.

2API key & free trial

The first time the pane opens you choose one of two paths:

Try free — no account. Enter your email address in the pane and an instant trial key is issued on the spot: 1,000 address validations + 1,000 geocoding lookups, valid 28 days, no signup, no card. If you ask again with the same email within 24 hours you get the same key back — you cannot lock yourself out by reinstalling.
I have a key. Paste an existing Acuris API key (trial, registered or subscription). It is verified live and your plan and balances appear in the footer.

The two paths do not carry the same allowance. The no-account instant key above is a finite 1,000 validations + 1,000 geocodes pool that expires after 28 days. Registering and verifying your email instead gives you an account, a dashboard, and a recurring allowance of 3,000 validations and 3,000 geocodes per UTC day that resets every UTC midnight and never expires.

Where your key is stored. The key is kept in Office's secure add-in storage on your machine or browser profile — it is never written into the workbook, into cells, into formulas or into document properties. A workbook you cleansed and shared contains only plain values, nothing else.

The pane footer always shows your live connection state and credit balances (validation, geocode), refreshed after every run. Trial keys show a countdown to expiry.

3Cleanse workflow

The core task: select your address data, map it once, run, and get verified, standardized addresses written to the right of your data.

Select your data in the sheet — one column of full addresses or several columns (street, house number, city, postcode, …). If row 1 looks like headers, the add-in treats it as headers and says so with an undo chip.
Check the mapping. The add-in auto-maps columns from their headers (multilingual: street/Straße/rue/via, ZIP/PLZ/postcode/CP, …). Two mapping styles:
- Freeform — one column, or several columns joined left-to-right, sent as a single address line.
- Fielded — columns mapped to Street, House number, City, Postcode, State/Region, Country, or "Street incl. house no." for combined EU-style columns. Unmapped columns are simply ignored.
Set the country layer. Country is resolved per row, in this order:
- a mapped Country column — the right answer for mixed-country files. Names are recognized in many languages and formats ("UK", "United States", "Deutschland", "DE", "deu"…);
- otherwise the workbook default country you pick in the pane (searchable, all 240+ countries, full-precision countries grouped on top);
- the add-in never guesses. Unrecognized country values are listed before the run with a quick fix-up — no row is ever billed against a guessed country.
Preview & cost. A 3-row preview shows exactly what will be sent, plus a cost estimate ("2,000 rows ≈ 2,000 validation credits") and the output destination. Existing cells in the output area trigger an overwrite warning.
Run. Rows are validated in chunks of 200 and results are written to the sheet as each chunk completes — you watch the sheet fill live. Progress shows rows done and time remaining; Cancel finishes the chunk in flight and stops.
Summary. Counts by status, plus one-click actions: Re-run failed rows, Re-run failed + no-match, Filter to failures, and Export summary to a new sheet.

Write Headers

The Write Headers action writes the selected output preset's header row (bold) at the active cell, so you can prepare a results area before running.

Your data is never touched

Output is always written to the right of your selection (or to a new sheet) — input columns are never modified. Note that, like all Office add-ins, writes made by the add-in cannot be undone with Ctrl+Z; keeping your originals untouched is the undo story.

4Output column reference

Output presets are versioned (address-full@1) and the column order is frozen — tooling built on top of the output will not break on updates. Status is always the first column, Error always the last.

Address — Full preset (35 columns)

#	Header	Contents
1	AV Status	Overall result: `Verified`, `Corrected`, `Partial (centroid)`, `No match`, `Error` or `Skipped`.
2	Formatted Address	The standardized address as one formatted string.
3	Street	Standardized street name.
4	House Number	Standardized house / building number.
5	City	Standardized city or locality.
6	State/Region	State, province or region.
7	Postcode	Standardized postal code.
8	Country	ISO-3 country code (e.g. `deu`, `usa`, `gbr`).
9	County (UK)	UK county — filled for UK results where applicable.
10	Confidence	Numeric confidence, 0–1.
11	Confidence Level	Letter grade `A`–`F`.
12	Accuracy	Geocode accuracy type: rooftop, arrival-point, street-interpolated, street-centroid, postcode-centroid or locality-centroid.
13	Match Score	Engine match score for the returned candidate.
14	Partial Match	`TRUE` when only part of the input could be matched (e.g. a centroid-level result).
15	Input Corrected	`TRUE` when the engine changed your input to produce the verified address.
16	Corrections	Which fields were corrected, joined with "; " (e.g. `Street; Postal code`).
17	Match: House No	Yes/No — did your house number match the reference data. Blank when the field was not part of the input.
18	Match: Street	Yes/No, as above, for the street.
19	Match: City	Yes/No, as above, for the city.
20	Match: Postcode	Yes/No, as above, for the postcode.
21	Match: State	Yes/No, as above, for the state/region.
22	Latitude	Latitude (WGS84).
23	Longitude	Longitude (WGS84).
24	UDPRN (UK)	Royal Mail Unique Delivery Point Reference Number — UK results.
25	UPRN (UK)	Ordnance Survey Unique Property Reference Number — UK results.
26	Reasons / Suggestion	Engine reason codes (e.g. `house_number_not_found`); when there is no match but a close candidate exists, the best suggestion's formatted address is appended after "→".
27–34	Census / geographic enrichment	USA & Canada only, street-accurate rows — free government open data (US Census Bureau TIGER/Line; Statistics Canada). Eight columns: `Census Tract`, `Block Group / DA`, `County / Census Div`, `State / Province`, `Metro (CBSA/CMA)`, `Electoral District`, `School District` (US), `Geo Source`. Blank for other countries or centroid-only rows.
35	Error	Transport or API error message for this row — empty on success.

Address — Compact preset (10 columns)

For "just fix my list" jobs: AV Status, Formatted Address, Street, House Number, City, State/Region, Postcode, Latitude, Longitude, Error.

Other presets

Preset	Columns
Geocode (6)	AV Status, Latitude, Longitude, Accuracy Type, Match Score, Error.
Postcode Expander (Source Row + 13)	Source Row, Organisation, Building Name, House Number, Street, Dependent Street, City, County, Postcode, UDPRN, UPRN, Latitude, Longitude, Accuracy Type.

5Other modes

Geocode only

Already-clean addresses? Same mapping UI, coordinates-only output (6 columns). Costs 1 geocode credit per row; the cost line in the pane always shows the pool it draws from before you run.

UK postcode expander

Unique to Acuris: expand UK postcodes into every delivery point at that postcode, straight from Royal Mail PAF data — including UDPRN and UPRN.

Single postcode: type it in the pane; one row per delivery point is written starting at the active cell.
Column of postcodes: select the column; results go to a new sheet with a Source Row back-reference per row.
1 credit per postcode, regardless of how many addresses it expands to.
Very large postcodes are capped at 100 delivery points — a banner tells you when a result was truncated.
Invalid or non-UK postcodes produce a single No match row.

Single-address lookup

A form in the pane, with the field order and placeholders adapting to the selected country (e.g. house-number-first for the US, street-first for Germany), plus a free-text tab. The result card shows the formatted address, status, accuracy, coordinates and corrections; you can copy it, insert it into the active cell, or insert it as a fielded row. 1 credit per lookup.

6Coverage & precision — an honest note

The add-in accepts addresses from 240+ countries and territories, but not every country is validated with the same depth. Precision is tiered:

Full precision: house-number-level reference data, point coordinates or interpolated coordinates where available.
United Kingdom: validated against the official Royal Mail PAF (33.9M delivery points), with UDPRN and UPRN included.
All other countries: validation and geocoding at the best available granularity — often street or locality level rather than individual house numbers. The Accuracy and Confidence Level columns tell you exactly what you got for every single row; centroid-level results are marked Partial (centroid), never dressed up as verified.

The country picker in the pane groups the full-precision tier on top, so you always know which tier a country is in before you run. Full country-by-country detail: coverage map.

7Limits, performance & credits

Limit	Value	Notes
Rows per request	200	Chunked automatically; up to 2 chunks in flight. You never see this limit.
Direct (sync) run size	5,000 rows	Raiseable to 10,000 in Settings.
Large runs (async jobs)	up to 50,000 rows	Submitted as a background job; the pane polls and writes results when ready. Jobs are per-country — mixed-country large runs are split into one job per country automatically.
UK (GBR) rows	~550 rows/min	UK rows are validated individually against the dedicated PAF service and paced to respect its velocity limits. Progress copy shows the honest estimate; larger UK runs simply take proportionally longer.
UK postcode expander	~50 postcodes/min	Adaptive pacing; the run slows down rather than failing.
Transient errors	auto-retried	Rate-limit and gateway errors (429/502/503/504) retry up to 3× with backoff before a row is marked `Error`.

Credit weights

Action	Cost	Pool
Address validated (any country, incl. UK)	1 credit / row	Validation
Geocode only	1 credit / row	Geocode
UK postcode expanded	1 credit / postcode	Validation

Failed rows don't cost anything. Rows that end in a transport or API error are automatically refunded — you pay for processed rows, not attempts.
Trial and registered keys have two independent pools (validation, geocode).
Subscription keys draw validation and geocoding from a single shared pool: a validation deducts 1 and a geocode deducts 2 from the same balance. The pane's cost estimate always reflects your key's actual pool structure before you run.

8Troubleshooting

Symptom	What it means	What to do
401 — key not accepted	The key is mistyped, revoked, or no longer exists.	Re-paste the key in the pane (it is validated live). If you lost your key, request a trial again with the same email — within 24 h you get the same key back — or register.
402 — payment required	A subscription was canceled or a prepaid credit pack expired.	Check your plan on the pricing page / customer portal, or contact support@acuris-geo.com.
403 — trial expired / credits exhausted	The trial window ended, or the pool for this product is empty.	The footer shows which pool ran out. Register for the recurring 3,000-per-day allowance (resets at UTC midnight) or purchase credits. Runs never start if the estimate exceeds your balance.
429 when requesting a trial key ("rate_limited_ip")	One instant trial per network per 24 h — a colleague on the same office network claimed today's trial.	Paste an existing key instead, or register — registration is not IP-limited. Requesting again with the same email within 24 h returns your existing key, not an error.
429 during a run	A temporary rate limit — most common on large UK runs.	Nothing — the add-in paces and retries automatically; the run continues at a reduced rate. Rows only show `Error` after repeated failures, and those can be re-run from the summary.
Add-in doesn't appear after adding	The store add-in hasn't loaded into the ribbon yet, or your organisation hasn't approved it.	Restart Excel — store add-ins appear on the Home ribbon (on Excel for the web, reopen the workbook). If your organisation manages Office add-ins, an admin may need to approve or deploy it from the Microsoft 365 admin center. Add-ins pushed via Centralized Deployment can take up to 24 h to appear for managed users.
Task pane is blank or shows an old version	Office cached an outdated copy of the pane.	Close and reopen the pane. If that doesn't help, clear the Office web cache (Windows: delete the contents of `%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Wef\`; Mac: use the "Clear Web Cache" option in the pane's ⓘ personality menu) and restart Excel.
"Network error" on every request (corporate network)	An SSL-inspection proxy is re-signing TLS traffic, which Office add-in requests reject.	Ask IT to exempt `api.acuris-geo.com` and `paf.acuris-geo.com` from TLS inspection (both serve only address data). A quick test: if the pane works on a phone hotspot but not the office network, it's the proxy.
Selection is rejected ("merged cells")	The selected range contains merged cells, which make row mapping ambiguous.	Unmerge the cells (`Home` → `Merge & Center` ▾ → Unmerge) and re-select.

Still stuck? Contact support — include the run's session ID from the pane's summary screen if you have one.

9Data handling

Only the columns you map are transmitted — over HTTPS, to Acuris servers operated by Acuris GmbH (Germany). Nothing else in the workbook is read or sent.
Your API key lives in Office's secure add-in storage, never in the workbook.
All results are written as plain static values — recipients of the workbook need neither the add-in nor a key.
See the privacy policy and, for UK data, the PAF® End User Terms.