This is a pretty useful excel sheet I sometimes use to geocode a number of address strings into latitudes and longitudes. It's pretty simple, using a function defined in VBA to call the Google API, feed in the string and pull the lat/long out of the XML response.

Obviously one could also use something like python to do this instead, but there's something extremely convenient about being able to call google directly from an Excel worksheet...

It's also worth noting that Google also have simple APIs like this one for calculating distances, directions, travel times, elevation, time zones and all sorts. Take a look!