Amazon.com Review
Business users seeking the shortest route between two points-of-purchase should examine Microsoft MapPoint 2002. It has all the standard features a business map user would expect--place finder, route planner, mileage calculator, and so on--but also permits extensive data manipulation throughout the United States and Canada.
Installation is a breeze, and setting up the program to any user's specifications should take only a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the nature of imported data. Once it's running, MapPoint will pay for itself quickly with improved sales and marketing reports, trip planning, and projections. The interface will be intimately familiar to Office users, so importing and exporting files and data is painless. The look and feel of other Office-suite programs is preserved--the learning curve of nonstandard tools and features is quite gentle.
One extremely powerful new feature is territory creation, which allows user-defined, overlaying boundaries that are simple to create manually or compose from pre-existing data. Combining territorial categories with the vast reams of census and demographic data contained within MapPoint should yield plenty of fresh business ideas. Nonbusiness users should pick up some much cheaper trip planning software; the most expensive features of MapPoint will offer little of value to them. --Rob Lightner
Amazon.com Product Description
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 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.
You can pinpoint exact customer or business sites on the map throughout the U.S. and Canada; full address searching is available for over 6 million miles of road in both countries. (MapPoint Europe is available separately.) Step-by-step instructions guide you on how to create maps with your own data, applying 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. With a feature new to this version, you can associate more data to a map by adding pie and column charts to maps. MapPoint will calculate optimized routes based on imported addresses, and turn simple routes into an analysis tool by generating drive-time zones to or from specified locations.
Import customer and contact information from Microsoft Excel, Access, or Outlook to create a map of their locations. Also, 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. The software also includes increased integration with other Office applications, including access points that make basic mapping functions easier to use. MapPoint supports data importation from Access, Excel, Outlook, or any SQL Server database.
