I just spent about $250 for Mappoint and was very excited about this product. As new business owner, I purchased MP to help in a presentation I have to give next week.

In my first couple of hours with it though, it has proved to be a MAJOR disappointment! I have already noticed a number of things which would seem basic and standard for this program. Maybe I am missing simple solutions, but I don't know VB and am not a coder. I have, however, worked extensively will many other MSFT products and am very computer literate. Did I miss the following, or did Microsoft severly underperform with this program? So basic....!

1) No way to choose to show all balloons at once, but instead have to click and choose each individually. What if you have over 100 balloons? Its crazy;

2) No way to move just the balloon without moving the pushpin. When two pushpins are close, the ballons obstruct each other. If I try to move one, the whole pushpin moves. Why?

3) No way to choose only the major streets and arterials for your pushpin map. Having all smaller streets in there is distracting when I am trying to reflect pushpin locations and data. Being able to choose only major streets seems so obvious.

4) No user manual included with the software.

Maybe I'm just an idiot, but this is not worth $250 at this point.

Any thoughts or suggestions are much appreciated...
Thanks

1) The Balloon issue comes up alot so I have created a COM-Addin, check my web site.

2) As far as moving the Balloon, you do have 4 choices: Upper/Lower Left, and Upper/Lower Right. If you have alot of pushpins close to each other it might not help much?

Use Street & Trips instead. It can do the same for you, but cost is about $30 for program.
Fred :D

I had and have the same problems on the balloons,etc... I finally had to give up and find something else to use. Our VP wanted to show site names, but the best I could do was show colored push pins and couldn't show any of the data imbeded in the approx. 200 sites...

Map-In-A-Box offers a solution tying MapPoint maps into MapInfo Professional.. the options for displaying and visualizing data are virtually limitless. I wrote a recent review on this web site, see the articles section.