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Microsoft MapPoint 2010 ReviewFirst, I recommend that you download the free full-featured 60-day trial and experiment before deciding whether to purchase. Except for the download time, installation is easy (trivial). The trial's reminders occur only when you start the app. If you decide to buy, activation is trivial--simply enter the key.
I got this package (for review) primarily for the "visualize business data" aspect advertised. What it turned out to be was an inconsequential update of what I remember of Microsoft Streets & Trips circa 2004. Then, the only reason I ever used S&T over online maps was to display address info from a simple spreadsheet. Recently, some of my colleagues would have benefited from importing spreadsheets with address info into a map application. When they tried to do this in Google Maps, their (understandable) reaction was best summed up by "Google doesn't want people like us to use this" and "Life is too short". Although MapPoint 2010 is "integrated" with MS Office, that integration fails far short of their needs: The data you can import into a map, and what you can do with it inside this app, is so severely constrained that I don't see any benefit to their types of tasks.
The maps themselves are of poor visual quality, especially the poor contrast. Some labels are medium gray against a light olive background. I routinely missed items I was looking for, not just labels, but push-pins and even bar charts. The characters in the labels are akin to what you got from a very low-resolution printer, one where the jagged edges from the pixels are readily apparent. Because of this, my sense is that as you scan the map the street labels--being at various angles--can slide from being perceived as text to being simply noise in the background.
I don't see myself using MapPoint 2010--for the things I do, it is no better, and often worse, than free Web-based resources. My key requirement was to be able to augment the places in the database, both annotating the ones they provide and adding places of my own, and then be able to execute searches against this augmented database. MapPoint supports none of the former and its searches ignore any tags, keywords and other annotations you might attach to an entry via the free-format field (searches are limited to name and city).
Note that Windows 7 is not on the list of supported operating systems. This could be an inadvertent omission in keeping with the lack of attention to detail in this product.
The remainder of this review gives details of the problems I found. Note: When I say that MapPoint cannot do something, it should be taken to include that I couldn't find how to do it. The "documentation" is limited to the usual Microsoft Help topics - snippets that help with potential terminological confusions and with finding items that are deeply buried in the menus, but mostly tell you what is blindingly obvious.
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The user interface is badly inconsistent and is clearly a mash-up. For example, in Find Nearby Places, a single-click on the name of a restaurant in the LHS pane produces a small semi-transparent box on the map showing its location, and a double-click produces the display of the information in an opaque box, but for other categories, such as Pharmacies and Schools, a single-click produces nothing. Another example: Some of the sub-panes in the LHS navigation pane are dismissed by clicking the "x" in an upper corner, others on the side (different icon), while yet others use a pop-up menu. Another example: The Undo capability applies to some categories and not others, without any discernible logic.
There are lots of little UI annoyances. For example, when the cursor gets within 16 pixels of an edge of the map, it turns into a large arrow, signaling that clicking the mouse will scroll the map. However, MapPoint doesn't seem to take that margin into account when calculating where to position clickable content, and I found myself too often having to scroll the map to be able to click on such items and then scrolling the map back to the original position.
The maps themselves were troublesome. I could not find how to display municipal boundaries. Names of cities were hard to find among all the other labels. Minor adjustments to the map would cause "strobing", for example, clicking on a balloon could radically alter which street labels were displayed. This was disconcerting when working on a map of a city I was familiar with, but for a city I was unfamiliar with, this was frustrating ("Where is Center Street? I thought it was on this map just a second ago."). Aside: You see bad choices of what to label on the world map as well, for example in looking at the Pacific, you find that the "Palau" label (tiny island nation) extends over the (unlabeled) Philippines.
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Map items--balloons/push-pins--that you import from a spreadsheet onto the map are limited to 8 fields: 2 are for names, 5 are address components and 1 is for your use (free-form data). The caption displayed when you selected a balloon is a small fixed size, so there is truncation of the info that you enter in these fields. Although there is plenty of room in the LHS navigation pane, only the first 8 entries are listed, rather than having a scroll-able list. Names have no structure, for example, if your database/spreadsheet has separate fields for first and last names, you need to merge those fields before importing (there is a second Name field, but it is not included in what is displayed in the navigation pane). Similarly, if you have a contact person in a department in a company, you need to combine them into a single name field. Similarly if your database uses multiple fields for street addresses (common because it simplifies validating data entry and selecting sections of a street). MapPoint does NOT support importing email addresses (other than as plain text in the free-format field), but it does allow you to enter Web addresses into the free-form field and it does recognize those and make them click-able, but it is so kludgy that it comes across as a quick patch (in a location's Properties window there is a non-functional text-entry field for the URL). The balloons/push-pins are in such muted colors that it was easy to overlook some of them.
Note: If you want to import a subset of data from your address book/contact manager application, the XLS or CSV file that it creates is likely to have similar problems. Since Outlook is/was part of the MS Office suite, I had expected at least that its export format would be directly import-able into MapPoint.
When importing data from a spreadsheet, MapPoint does some corrections. For street suffixes--St, Ave, Rd, Lane, Way, Circle,...-it did a good job on the spreadsheets I used as tests (from real-world applications). However, my city is not a difficult case: Except for cul-de-sacs, there are no name conflicts between categories--for example, there isn't a First St and a (perpendicular) First Ave--and circumstances mean that the street numbers in those cul-de-sacs are rarely (never?) possible ones on the corresponding main street. However, the correction algorithm is very simplistic and makes lots of mistakes. For example, in importing 250 addresses within my city, two entries were missing the city field. One street name was very unusual and the city was guessed correctly, but the other had a street name of "Lincoln" and the guesses were all from the other side of the country--MapPoint did not use either the addresses already imported or the locale being displayed on the map to bias its guesses. Similarly on the misspelled street name "Bryon": MapPoint guessed "Bryson" from a nearby ZIP Code rather than "Byron" from the Zip Code given in the entry. Corrections are limited to selecting one of its guesses: If it guesses badly, you have to tell it to skip the whole entry rather than providing guidance or a manual correction. For a product that prominently advertises its integration with MS Office, I expected it to offer the option to have corrections also be made to the spreadsheet being imported. But MapPoint does not even log the corrections being made so that you can later update the spreadsheet yourself--you need to manually create that list as the error messages are displayed.
Because of the constraints on the data you can import into a map, I would likely do my filtering of my dataset within the spreadsheet, using MapPoint only to create the map to be printed or exported into an MS Office document. Because I can't import data directly from my spreadsheet and database formats (names and addresses need to be collapsed), it is pointless to do any updates to the data within MapPoint because the exported format would require difficult processing to get back to the underlying format.
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FIND: The Help topics state that the Find operation connects to the Internet. For me, it only searched the program's database. For added items, it searched the name field, but not the free-form text field.
The Find operation cannot be geographically limited, for example, to the area of the map currently being displayed or a ZIP Code. You _can_ include the city name as a search term, but it is subjected to the same fuzzy matching as other search terms. Adding a street name or ZIP Code to the search terms produces substantially _worse_ results, indicating that those fields are ignored by search. Example: "peet's coffee, palo alto" produces 6 matches (the 3 sought, 1 understandable, 2 inexplicable). Add the ZIP Code of one of them ("94306") and there are over 130 hits.
Note: The SEARCH icon on the toolbar seems to have no real purpose: It brings up a LHS pane for "Search results", but nothing seems to use it--the...Read more›
Microsoft MapPoint 2010 OverviewMicrosoft MapPoint 2010 gives you the power to visualize business data, communicate insights with instant impact, and integrate maps into the work you do in Microsoft Office. Get trip routing and turn-by-turn directions to easily plan better trips.
MapPoint 2010
Updated maps--New geographic and demographic data
Customize map settings--Choose whether cities, highways, local roads and parks show on your map
More pushpin images--Includes those from previous versions of MapPoint
GPS ready--Send your route to your GPS device*
Data mapping--Use maps to visualize the meaning of your data
Create territories--Define your own delivery or sales areas
Programming--Build custom solutions and Office add-ins
Product Features
MapPoint helps you visualize your business data:
Create maps using custom Map Settings to display your data with only the details you want to appear. Easily turn labels on or off, change font style or map style.
Dramatically improve decision-making by bringing clarity to tabular data.
Use information-rich maps to illuminate important data relationships, identify business trends, and illustrate opportunities.
Create sales territories and share performance maps to clearly visualize, analyze, and communicate business information.
Combine business data with included demographics to target potential customers and focus decisions.
MapPoint helps you streamline your travel:
Arrive on time. Detailed directions--voice** and text-prompted--make it easy to follow your route.
Optimize your trip. Quickly calculate mileage, drive time, and expenses in advance.
Navigate with ease.Plan your trip on your PC and then print, or send your route to your GPS device.*
MapPoint makes it easy to use maps in combination with your Microsoft Office documents:Seamlessly integrate maps into the work you do in Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Office.
Tell a story, visually.Insert maps into Word documents and PowerPoint presentations to illustrate everything from sales performance and customer locations to new business opportunities.
Tap into existing data sources Create maps from data stored in current versions of Office Excel, Office Access, Microsoft SQL Server, or other database sources.
Extend your business. Take advantage of the extensible MapPoint object model to build custom business solutions such as fleet tracking and business intelligence.
* Exporting to GPS must be done via MSN® Direct (subscription required) or via USB. Separate download of free plug-in may be required. Not all GPS devices are supported. Visit www.microsoft.com/mappoint/devices for more information. ** GPS device sold separately. GPS functionality requires a GPS device that supports NMEA 2.0 or later and an available USB port.
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