MapPoint 2006: I dig it
On Sunday I confessed an interest in things GIS. Recently that interest has been rekindled by the ESRI podcasts and because the MapPoint team was kind enough to send the MVPs a copy of MapPoint 2006. I’ve used MapPoint for things like Driving Directions in the past. MP2004 as pretty good for that, but you could tell the road maps were getting a bit long in the tooth. I also felt it was a good tool for team driving: one person piloting the car, one using MP to navigate.
My first experiment with MP2006 was as an in-drive navigation aid like TomTom or NeverLost. I really only have nits to pick. First, it is hard to hear the voice guidance on my lap given where the speakers are, so I found myself pulling over and cranking up the audio. It still wasn’t as loud as I’d like, but it worked. Having used NeverLost, it really liked its tone telling you that you made correct turn or needed to make a turn now. MP doesn’t give that kind of feedback and I wished it would.
But one thing that I like MP2006 for is that it can record a trip in a trail. You can save the trail right now, but that’s it. I have noticed, however, that you can copy and paste the trail to the clipboard and with a little programming, you can get the data in the trail from the clipboard. What I’ve not fully figured out is how to parse this into useful data. Ideally I’d like to get the position and time data and I do think that’s possible. If and when I figure out how, I’ll post that here.
The other cool thing in MP2006 I’m enjoying the exportability of demographic data to Excel format. For example, I’ve been doing a couple of demos where I’ve extracted the number of households in a given zip code that frequent flyer plans and used SSIS to massage that into SQL Server. It makes for a good test of a lot of data at least.