An online test drive (and mini-tutorial) for MapPoint is available here:

Microsoft MapPoint Test Drive

This uses the Citrix Browser Plug-in which was a little slow to get started with my wireless "Broadband" connection (Sprint EVDO), but with a little patience it did finally load. The registration is quick and painless. But doing Citrix (like WebEx or VNC) stuff with graphics and maps over the internet with EVDO is just too slow. I'd recommend to check this out when you are on a faster broadband connection.

A Flash tour is available here:

MapPoint FlashDemo

This is straightforward, again it does take a little while to load on a slow connection but once it does it is easy to view and navigate without any lag. It is slick and quickly shows many things that can be visualized and lots of things you can do with MapPoint. (But I'd recommend to turn off the sound :- ).

Any thoughts on where to find more info. The tutorial is fine, but I want to learn how to customize my views (ie - only show one state at a time or show the entire US - all 50 states - without making the map so big that it includes Canada and Mexico)...

Eric's Single State Mapper will do that by hiding the un-required bits underneath white shapes.
(download an example from this site or mine)

Unfortunately this is the best that can be done. MapPoint always has all the map visible.



Richard

Originally Posted by c2linguist

Any thoughts on where to find more info..

For organized reading material, I would start with the Help file.. there are some tutorials in there.

Then the MapPoint for Dummies book.

If you planning to do some programming I would also recommend the O'Reilly book "Programming MapPoint in .NET" (even if you aren't using .NET).

Also, the MP2K Magazine articles and newsletters.
MP2K Magazine Articles
MP2K Magazine Newsletters

Finally this forum has a great wealth of information, Search for any topic using the tool above.

Richard is right about displaying individual states, it's not perfect, but we have the template which can cover up states with a white polygon. Hopefully Microsoft will make it more seamless in future version of MapPoint.

Try out the sample download.
Map Individual U.S. States in MapPoint

For whole countries you would have to have similar polygons to cover them up, I don't know if anyone has this template for sale, but I could create one for a custom request...

hope this helps.
Eric

now its stiky

I have been using this tool for a long time....and trust me I never paid for any third party tool. So i would suggest this one.
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Originally Posted by c2linguist

Any thoughts on where to find more info. The tutorial is fine, but I want to learn how to customize my views (ie - only show one state at a time or show the entire US - all 50 states - without making the map so big that it includes Canada and Mexico)...

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