Amazon.co.uk Review
Microsoft has two mapping products, which can be confusing. If you are only looking for route-planning, place-finding and general-purpose mapping, try
Autoroute.
MapPoint 2002 does all of this too, but its real purpose is data mapping, which is the business of combining data with geographic information. The classic example is where you want to analyse sales by region, taking into account things such as population, average income or occupation type.
MapPoint 2002's Data Mapping Wizard is an easy-to-use tool that lets you create a variety of data maps, combining your own figures with its built-in statistics. The product covers the whole of Europe, although the actual data available varies from country to country. In the case of Great Britain, there are nearly 50 data fields which can be displayed at the level of postcode sector, district or region. A postcode sector is a fairly small area, so there is a huge amou! nt of data involved. You can purchase additional statistics from a third party, or of course add your own custom data and territories.
MapPoint 2002 belongs to the
Office family of products, and there is good integration with Excel, Access and
SQL Server for sourcing data. Maps can easily be exported to Excel for further analysis or reporting, or saved as a Web page. The general-purpose features of
MapPoint 2002 are handy too, with full route planning, GPS (Global Positioning System) support and the ability to export maps to Pocket Streets, running on a Pocket PC handheld device. This is a bonus: what counts is that
MapPoint 2002 is a great value tool for making sense of geographical data. --
Tim Anderson
Manufacturer's Description
Designed for everyday business use, Microsoft MapPoint allows Microsoft Office users of any skill level, in any size organization, to easily visualize their business information, communicate key data using maps and integrate maps into the work they do in Office. MapPoint is a unique business-mapping program that combines powerful mapping and analysis tools with the simplicity of Microsoft Office, enabling people to see how location makes a difference to their business.Create maps with your own data. Step-by-step instructions guide you on how to apply your sales information, and demographic variables to a variety of map types. Make your map look how you want by defining data range, legend label and ramp color palette. Associate more data to a map by adding pie and column charts to maps. Get address-to-address driving directions. MapPoint will calculate optimized routes based on imported addresses. Turn simple routes into an analysis tool by generating drive-time zones to/from a specified location(s). Import customer, and contact information from Microsoft Excel, Access or Outlook to create a map of their locations. Create your own pushpin icons and use them on your data maps. Or choose multiple symbols that best represent a Series of data. Create maps that group common areas and overlay key information to these regions. MapPoint provides increased integration with other Office applications, including access points that make basic mapping function easier to use. MapPoint also supports data importation from Access, Excel, Outlook or any SQL Server database.
