Here's a PTM file with county lines. The county line boundaries were imported from a free government source using a modified version of the Spatial Data Importer developer sample originally released by Microsoft in 2001 or 2002.

This PTM file was prepared for a user who noticed that county lines don't show up at the same zoom levels as they had in a previous version of MapPoint. The county lines did not show up when you were zoomed out.

See attached screenshots.

Let me know if you have any questions or special requests! I have a small utility in Excel VBA that can change the line width and color. It could also be used to set the fill (background) color of the county polygons as well as the "ZOrder" (in front or behind the roads). If there is a need for this I can clean it up and post it as a companion to this download.

Eric

Hi Eric,

Revision to MapPoint 2009 County Lines thinner is just what the doctor ordered! Looks great and I started using it already. Thanks for your assistance on this one. Much better with County lines on full US Map that I really needed.

Glad you find it useful! I had to fiddle with it for a while to get it to work right.. hope other people find a use for it as well!
Eric

Love, love, love the county lines!! But I found this too late to use it as a template for the 300+ map files I just created over the past month.

Is there a way for me (non-programmer) to get the lines into one of my existing saved map files?

I should clarify: I do realize that I can open the county line file and add my other data layers to it. But I have territories along with several data sets on my existing maps....so lots of copy and paste x 300 maps

Thanks,
Cris

Hi Cris,

Thanks for signing up for access to the MapForums Download Section! I hope you continue to find stuff in here useful.

There might be a couple ways to tackle this.

1. Develop a tool/utility to copy all shape objects from one map to another. However I think this might be really slow for 3,000 county shapes, especially as you mention you have 300 map ptm's! Speaking of which, the utility could easily be modified to say copy every shape object in one ptm to every ptm in a target folder. I'd say let's try it, but keep in mind it might be too slow e.g. take days possibly

2. Develop a similar tool, but instead of coping shapes, copy Datasets from one PTM to another. In this case, the source PTM would be your own maps, and the target would be the County Line template. I'd imagine this would tons faster, but as you mentioned you also have territories, and I'm actually not sure the Territories layer can be copied from one map to another.

How many Territories are in your set of maps?

I'd say, let's try #1 first, in any case it would be a good tool to add to the MapForums Downloads Section, and then if that is too slow, let's try #2 or try to think of another approach.

best,
Eric

Hi Eric, Thanks for the welcome, and for the ideas

We have 360 territories incorporating about 24K ZIP Codes and covering about 50% of the US geography. We're analyzing residency patterns for each of those territories, and incorporating census medians like income and home market values into the analysis. Pretty data-heavy maps, which is why we decided to do individual map files to start with.

This morning we copied the data sets and territories (yep, territories copy & paste quite well) from one of the map files into the county lines file and worked with it a little. It's helpful to see the county lines....but navigating the map slows to about 5% of normal speed. It's so slow that we've decided to only use the county lines when we really, really need them, and we're not going to automatically incorporate them into the remaining maps.

On a positive note, there are several other situations where the county lines will be invaluable, so we're still delighted with the find!

Thanks,
Cris

Did you say what version of MapPoint you are using?

I forgot to mention, with MapPoint 2010+ you can use the Map Settings pane to make the County Lines visible at more zoom levels. This uses the built-in county line cartography, not "heavy" shapes added to the map, so it doesn't slow down the map rendering at all.

Eric

We have 2009, 2010, and 2011. We're using 2009 for this project because it does not have the color bug - that goofy thing where it only uses 7 of the 8 colors in the data range, and they change all the time.

I had actually forgotten about the customize feature on 2010. But the data colors are much more important, so we have to stick with 2009

Thanks for all your great suggestions!

Regarding the color bug, I've seen this and I haven't tracked it down precisely. Are you sure it still happens with MapPoint 2011? Someone in here was doing some testing and thought it went away with MapPoint 2011.

From your experience, did things get any better with MapPoint 2011? Or exactly the same bug/bugs as with MapPoint 2010?

Thanks,
Eric

Unfortunately, I did try it, and it still occurs with MP2011. Like you, I saw the other posts that claimed it was fixed, but it's a sneaky little bug. In both 2010 and 2011, the data set colors may appear to map correctly at first, but when you change the zoom, add other data, or take a snap shot everything goes whacky. You lose one color. If you're low on resources, you can even lose all but one color. This is especially true if you are mapping data sets on top of territories - something we do all the time.

It's also deceptive because if you save the file and reopen it, you get your colors back. But only temporarily. Do anything and one color disappears again.

If you'd like to recreate it for yourself, I can walk you thru what we routinely did and how to spot it quickly. We struggled with it for almost a year before deciding to revert back to MP2009. And boy, do I miss some of the additional functionality of the later versions - like Back and Forward view...and county lines. Sigh.

Thanks
Cris