Microsoft MapPoint 2006 Standard Edition
List Price: $299.00 Our Price: $249.99 You Save: $49.01 (16.4%) Availability: | Usually ships in 24 hours (as of 4:07 PM CT - detail) |
Use updated geographic and demographic data sets in MapPoint to display trends and illustrate key points on maps.New Driving Guidance takes your location from a connected GPS device and combines it with a route you have created to give you voice-prompted driving directions.Group common areas and overlay key information to these regions with maps that you create maps.Create maps with your own data. Step-by-step instructions guide you through applying your sales information and demographic variables to a variety of map types.
Product Description
Microsoft MapPoint 2006 helps business users to visualize, analyze, and communicate data. It includes updated geographic and demographic data, plus text and voice-prompted driving guidance. Make it easier for organizations to visualize their business in a whole new way. Getting to meetings and customers is easy; just plug it into your laptop and go!
Spotlight Customer Reviews:
Summary:
Disappointed
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Comment:
Once I began defining the territories, using the US census geographic unit, my system crashed. I was not even halfway through the process. Microsoft's suggestions were to uninstall and reinstall but this did not fix the problem. Currently I am able to use about half of the functionality. I am very unhappy with this purchase.
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Summary:
Printing is difficult
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Comment:
This product is fine if you do not want to print your map. I created a territory and added locations via the pushpins. At a lower zoom level, my pushpins overlap and are unreadable. I wanted to print the whole territory at a certain zoom level to allow veiwing of all the pushpins without overlap onto however many pages it takes. This is not possible. It will only print what you see on your screen. If you want to print your whole map, you literally have to save your screen view into a graphic file, scroll to the next area, save it as well and repeat until you have saved your entire territory. Once you have saved the whole map in peices, you can print all your files and tape them together to make one big map. Ridiculous!!
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Summary:
Great Tools
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Comment:
There is a lot of meat to this product; identify drive times from a certain location, overlay income or other demographic info and convert selected areas into zip codes and export to Excel. Export maps in Word with push pins showing the location of important locations for others without MapPoint. Not particularly easy to learn and the book MapPoint for Dummies is an earlier version. Still, its a powerful program with great tools.
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Summary:
Beware of Upgrades
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Comment:
First, keep in mind that Mappoint is NOT forward-compatible; i.e., your 2006 maps will be useless to anyone who owns prior versions. And, the 2006 version will not "save as" an older version either. In short, if you upgrade, everyone else will also need to upgrade.
Otherwise, it's a decent program, although its "idiot-proof" functionality inhibits flexibility. For example, city names will obscure your every map whether you want them or not. I remove them by exporting my maps as jpg files, and editing them in Photoshop -- but that is a huge, and unnecessary, nuisance.
Mappoint is a basic mapping program with some data-plotting features. Easy to use, colorful, very readable, but limiting. Microsoft could use some competition.
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Summary:
$25 worth of features in a $270 box
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Comment:
We purchased this software to map retail locations on a region. It is missing too many features to be usable. For instance, when you import a custom graphic pushpin, the software doesn't resize it as you zoom which forces you to create multiple sizes in another program. You can add text description boxes but have no control over the font or sizing -- and they don't resize either.
We highlighted our specific region but the software doesn't let you print just that region (called 'territory.) We searched the help files and their word 'territory' is not even listed.
You cannot save your map graphics in any standard graphics format, e.g. JPEG, PDF or ai. We tried printing to a PDF generator, but Map Point's map output is of very poor resolution even on the highest settings.
After wasting a lot of time, it's apparent we should have tried Google Maps/Earth with our graphics editing software for a solution that works.
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