Hello all,

I am a graduate business student at the University of Michigan working on a summer project, and need to plot data on a world map. I am new to mapping software, and actually just learned the word "geocoding" a few days ago. Anyhow, I am going to have an excel spreadsheet with thousands of addresses representing locations all over the world. I will need to map these addresses in a timely fashion, and would also like a few additional features such as the ability to change the circle size representing each location, and to change the color of some circles. The ability to include numerical data in each circle would be a plus too.

After doing some research online, I believe these requirements should be relatively basic. Microsoft MapPoint appears to be great, but apparently it is offered in only two versions- North America and Europe. My data will include locations all over the world, with a lot in China and Japan, etc. Can MapPoint somehow handle world maps via Bing? If not, does anyone have any recommendations regarding alternate products?

Thank you in advance,

Matt

You can plot points in other parts of the world, BUT there's no geocoding (a global geocoding database would be huge - assuming such a thing could be built), also zoom levels are limited outside the geographical area of interest.

So your best bet for better global geocoding coverage is to try and use one of the various online web services. Yes Bing Maps would be a good start. There are competing services.

OpenStreetMaps might be worth a look (free, open source, and fairly good global coverage) but I don't know how good their geocoding support is. When I tried to use their data for global routing (with pgRouting), I found the entire solution rather "wanting" in abilities and stability.

Good answer.

If you can geocode outside of MapPoint for areas not covered in the NA and EU versions, then MapPoint can still be a good and easy visualization tool.

If your data points are not too close together, then the zoom level limitations won't be an issue with MapPoint for instance if you are always looking at the continent or country level.