MapForums

I work in the headquarter office of Minor League Baseball, and I am looking to create a huge mileage chart that shows the shortest drivable route between the 160 Minor League Baseball clubs in the United States. I have all of the street addresses in Excel, and I would like to know if MapPoint has the ability to create a chart, preferable a matrix like you see in an atlas. I could use MapQuest for free and input every possible combination, but I really don't have a year to spend on this project.

Is MapPoint capable of handling this task? I would be satisfied if MapPoint can calculate the mileage for each datapoint, and I will type them into a matrix.

Thanks.

I've written something similar for a client in the past.

The source and destination addresses (they were separate in that application) were stored in an Excel-compatible CSV file. My program then used MapPoint to find all the addresses and find the route distances.

The biggest issue is speed. 160 addresses comes out as 12,720 route distances to find.

In the previous application, I found each route took about 1 second (but it increases with lots of routes, due to poor/lazy memory management in MapPoint).
If 1/sec can be maintained, then 12,720 works out at about 3 and a half hours.

It could be quickly coded in VB if you're upto doing a bit of programming, or I could be hired to produce a tailor-made program for you (my choice would be C++).


Richard

__________________
Winwaed Software Technology LLC
http://www.winwaed.com
See http://www.mapping-tools.com for MapPoint Tools
Pre-Order MapPoint 2009 today: http://www.mapping-tools.com/mappoint2009

Wow! The above thread resulted in quite a few email and private message queries!

I have since written an add-in to compute mileage charts. Called "MileCharter", it can produce traditional "road atlas" style charts or charts like the parent post refers to. It can also compute route distances, travel times, and estimated costs.
For further details and free download, see:

http://www.mapping-tools.com/milecharter/index.shtml


Richard

__________________
Winwaed Software Technology LLC
http://www.winwaed.com
See http://www.mapping-tools.com for MapPoint Tools
Pre-Order MapPoint 2009 today: http://www.mapping-tools.com/mappoint2009