An address locator lets you convert textual descriptions of locations into geographic features. Address Locators are stored and managed in a workspace you choose. The workspace can be a file folder, file geodatabase, personal geodatabase or SDE geodatabase.

There are three main parts of the process of creating a new address locator. The first is to choose the style of locator to create. The second is to point the locator at the data that it will be used to match against. The third is to match the fields that the locator expects to see against the fields in the reference (street) data. In the case shown above, the fields all match, so you can skip the last step.