MapForums

OK, MapPoint is a low cost, quite reasonable mapping tool. If you want to plot your holiday route to Skegness and see what demographics are available on the way then this is the tool for the job.

Personally I bought MapPoint to plot data based on postcodes. For this application MapPoint is not the tool for the job. Sure I can feed MapPoint a list of postcodes but the software will not be able to find them all because the data being used to find the postcode locations is out of date. Define a territory and ask MapPoint to produce an excel sheet for the underlying postcode data and it will immediately respond… trouble is the data will be wrong! If you want to buy mailing list data and use this method you will get back data with large holes in it! Worst case scenario is that your customers will trust you to list postcodes in a given geographic area and when they find out the mailing they did didn’t, in fact, reach all of the areas because you used MapPoint you could just get a large bill or even a letter from their solicitors!
Call Microsoft and you will be told to look on the web for an answer! Ask for more help and they will tell you that you need to buy the latest version of the software. Tell them you have the latest version and the phone will go quite silent then they will tell you they will have to have someone look into that.

As I said; Nice looking product. Could use a few extra features but nothing to moan about. Firstly though I’d say Microsoft needs to figure out a simple way to keep the PAF data in MapPoint up to date or throw away the all but useless postcode feature that does not work.

I have had the same problems with geocoding. Sometimes the pushpins are set on a place hundred kilometers away from the real place when the geocoding was made via postcode, city and street. But I consider this not to be a problem of the MP-data but of the algorithm to find the correct coordinates. So I wrote a tool which uses the FindAddressResults - function and corrects the results. The resulting coordinates are written in the database. Later, the import-wizard uses these coordinates.

In my example with 6000 customers I got pretty good results.

Rainer