I have user data in excel that includes address. I have plotted each user in mappoint, but want to show the route from each of these users to a single location. My end goal is to find the most used routes so I can strategically place a billboard ad where the most people will see it on the way to a certain location. Is there a way to do this?

Hi Samalyst, welcome to the forums! How long have you been using MapPoint? What version?

You could do it with a little bit of automation using Excel macro's controlling MapPoint. How many routes/users?

Assuming there's a lot, I would probably tackle it by looping over all the users, drawing the route, and extracting coordinates along the route (article & code in the MapForums Downloads section $99 Extracting Coordinates of a Route ).

You'd end up with a ton of points on top of each other.

Then, to group them, I think I would export lat/lon's and simply round to the nearest hundredth e.g. lat/lon 40.12345/-90.12345 becomes 40.12/-90.12. (I'd play with that a bit to see what rounding factor works best, maybe five hundredth or one thousandth.) Then group these and get a count using a pivot table or Access, and re-map the grouped result using the Sized Circle map. Then I think you would get a pretty clear picture of the most traveled roads. Make sense?

Some of this is a little bit advanced e.g. writing the macro to loop over and create all the routes, extracting the lat/lon's, etc. but nothing terribly sophisticated either. Sounds like a fun project! I'd be happy to work with you on a training/consulting basis to get over the hurdles, or if you have any specific questions feel free to post here.

Eric
m: 312-399-1586

Thanks for the reply. I've been using MapPoint 2011 on and off for about a year. Your solutions sounds a little more complicated than my skills will allow. This is not something that I need, it just seemed like a simple thing that should be built into MapPoint, and would've been a useful tool.

Makes sense.

It's funny that MapPoint can be used in so many different ways, depending on the industry and scenarios people think of MapPoint as a very different tool. I don't know if I'm making sense, but for my wife, MapPoint is strictly a restaurant searching tool, when she would travel she'd use it to hunt down Indian or Korean restaurants. Other people only use MapPoint for graphing out and visualizing sales data. My point is that something you think would be obvious and simple thing, is actually very niche when you consider the extremely broad range of what MapPoint is capable of out of the box and the various ways people use it. The fact that it can be automated and integrated with other software makes it that much more powerful.

In any case, I'm still interested in your project, it does sound very interesting. Would you be interested in working with me to create an article of your project for publication in one of our upcoming newsletters? I'd work on the technical aspects and you could provide and background and storyline. Then you could get it done for free, and you'd also generate a little free press for your company .

Thanks!
Eric