Importing Street Atlas overlays into MP

Don't laugh, but my staff has made literally thousands of maps in Street Atlas. Street Atlas isn't "doing it" for us any more. We need more functionality. However, we don't want to have to totally re-create all of our Street Atlas maps over again. I'm pretty sure MapPoint can import the lats & lons from Street Atlas, but will it also import any of the cosmetic draw and text objects we have added?

I don't remember -- can you export the coordinates of the drawing and text objects from StreetAtlas to text? If not, you're out of luck, but assuming you can get those coordinate into a text file: you would then have to "massage" (I like perl for text file manipulation) those into mif/mid, a MapInfo GIS exchange format, using a script and import them. This would require some at least two custom scripts / programs. For the import into MapPoint you can start with the Spatial Data Importer developer sample.

What issues are you having with StreetAtlas (i.e. in what way is it no longer "doing it")? There might be an option to upgrade within their product line which might allow an easier migration?

Note that what I'm describing above is a migration to MapPoint, I don't think Streets & Trips (which is priced around the same as StreetAtlas) is an option for you as S&T doesn't have drawing and text import capabilities.

Eric