I have a group of Lat/Lons in Excel in a certain order. I copy those into MapPoint and it creates the pins. I need to get a route based on the order the coordinates are in Excel. This seems so simple, but yet impossible to do so far. If I select all the pins, and add to route, it does them in some other order, but definitely not the order I have them. Any way to do this?

This is a common problem, and the "MPRouteReader" half of our MPRouteWriter product was written to solve it.

Add a column to your data and use this to specify the order (eg. simple sequence numbers 1,2,3,4). Import into MapPoint as before. Import the sequence number field as "Other Data". Then use MPRouteReader (when installed it sits on the Tools Menu) to create a route from the imported pushpin set, sorting the pins by the sequence number field.
There are other options that let you do things like select a subset of the pins (allows you to import the pins for multiple routes at once), etc.

MPRouteWriter itself does the opposite - write a route's waypoints to Excel in route order.

Licenses cost US$75 but there's a free 14 day trial. See RouteWriter: Export Routes from Microsoft MapPoint (http://www.routewriter.com) for further details, downloads, and purchase links.

Thanks for the reply, but this is enough for me to find another mapping software. This is very typical of Microsoft, not thinking enough about the design to miss something so simple as this. I appreciate your help though!

It is perhaps a gap that should have been filled by Microsoft (and that's definitely the case for the MPRouteWriter side of things), but I think you're going to be hard pressed to find any map software with similar capabilities and reasonably upto-date road data for the price of MapPoint+MPRouteWriter...

I agree with Richard (Winwaed). For a lot of the custom logistics/routing solutions I write for clients, there really is no other platform to which to compare MapPoint for functionality and affordability. And it is very easy to automate for people familiar with Office VBA macros.

By the way, it just so happens that just a few days ago someone posted a similar question and posted a very simple Excel VBA macro that accomplishes this.

http://www.mapforums.com/import-addresses-excel-using-vba-17933.html

There are also a lot more sophisticated routing macros with full source code in the MapForums Downloads section ($99).

hope this helps,
Eric

This was perfect!!! I use VBA in Excel all the time, and until you mentioned it, did not think about that being a benefit of MapPoint. Awesome! Worked perfect! THANKS!!!