| Re: Will MapPoint meet my needs
Not sure what you mean by postcode details. If your customers are located in your database by postcode then you can read these into MP and it will plot the locations of all the valid postcodes. If you have a further data value eg. sales per customer then you can routinely get MP to sum or average the data at a sector, district, area or county level which allows you to map it and output the summarised data to excel. So basically provided your customers are geographically referenced MP will do the rest. MP can also plot postal addresses with or without postcode and then as above summarise at postcode geography. You always need to check the diagnostics on address plotting to be clear what element of the address has actually been plotted!
In terms of overlaying data you can import data provided it is appropriately geographically referenced. For example if you had a postcode sector database of demographics it would be easy to read that in and use it (MP does have a demographic data-base built in, again with bugs). On the other hand if the data related to wards or your own defined areas it’s less easy to make that work well, because MP doesn’t handle new boundary data very well. If your data relates to individual locations then again it works fine eg. colour coding customers on the basis of amount spent. In my work I use Output Area data from the census which are very small census tracts covering the UK. I have the centroid for each one and generally use colour coded dot maps that work well. |