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Ok, as is obvious I am new here and relativly new to mappoint. I work for a large company (in excess of 40 billion a year in net revenue) with over 400,000 employees. Due to our huge size, we move VERY slowly in some cases, unfortunatly technology is one of them.

In my office we have several machines that we use mappoint on. After briefly looking over a few threads here I realize that our usage is extermely simple and we could most likely just use streets and trips if our corporate IT people would ever approve it. That being said I was able to finally get a 2006 liscence for my laptop. Now that it's on and I have created a few simple maps we ran into the issue of the other 3 machines not being able to open the map due to running 2004. These maps are simple with only some colored lines and text boxes on them. They do take ~6 hours to create though so recreating every map twice for each version is out of the question. Currently, getting the other three boxes upgraded to 2006 is also out of the questiuon due to $ concerns (yes, we have tons of $ but I never seem to get any of it... hmmm...)

Anway, does anyone know how to open a mappoint 2006 map in mp 2004? Is there a way I can change/save the original 2006 file in some way that 2004 can read it? If not I understand but any chance to save alot of time is worth it. Thanks a ton for any answers!

Hi,

You can try to save the map in different formats. Sure some of the formats should be backward compatible (or should I say upward). You have *.ptt, *.ptm, and *.somethingelseIthink.

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Thanks for that. The file is currently in ptm and that did not work. I will try ptt and see if the other machines can do that. It will take a few hours as I am not at the office but I am definitly going to try.

ptt will not work, it is the same file, except with a ptt extension. It is like a .xlt file for Excel. The t just tells the app to treat it as a template when opening and not write changes back to that original file.

I think what you should do so as not to have to create the file in both versions, is to create the file in MapPoint 2004. MapPoint 2006 can open a MapPoint 2004 file. Can you get MapPoint 2004 for your laptop?

There is a hack for reading/writing to MapPoint binary files, see this newsletter --
Utilizing MapPoint for Emergency Services, MapLinx Pro, Greg Slayden, Action Engine

I'm not sure it was ever tested with MapPoint 2006 and don't know if it will work for you might it might be worth a shot instead of say spending 6 hours to recreate the file in MapPoint 2004.

Good luck!

Eric

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You are correct, the ptt file did not work as well. Unfortunatly making maps in 2004 is becoming a bad option as we need the updated street information from 2006 for some of what we do. I have gotten lost twice trying to follow mp2004 maps because the street no longer went through or some other stupid thing.

I will try the hack and see what the results are, thanks!