Language Problem (?)

Hello Guys,

I have been trying out the German language version of MapPoint 2004 for a few
days now and there is this one question that I could not find an answer for in the
docs or anywhere on the web.

I think of using MapPoint as a sales analyzing and forecasting tool for Europe.
I often attend meetings with people from other countries, like France or Italy,
and I'd love to use MapPoint for my presentations, but I seem to have a slight
language problem. Here it goes:

When I create a map with my German version, the foreign cities all show up with
the German name. For example, Milano in nothern Italy shows up as "Mailand".

I would like to see city (and country names) either in English or (even better) in
their respective language. I could not find an option for this, yet it seems very
strange to me that such basic functionality isn't built-in.

Can anybody help?
(Or at least tell me that there is no way, so I stop searching)

Thanks!

Tschuess,
Kaspar Utz

I just tried the English version of MapPoint 2004 Europe. The software has improved a lot regarding the amount of data provided. Now the European version covers at least some of Scandinavia as well. However, I was immediately pissed off by the same problem you did; most street/location names in Helsinki are displayed as Swedish versions instead of Finnish. The Finnish names are contained in the data as "find address" matches them. There should definitely be an option to choose preferred language version for the names, or the Finnish versions should be displayed instead of Swedish version whenever possible. Only a tiny minority speaks Swedish here and even they don't use the Swedish names of locations/streets. Besides there seems to be quite a bit on inconsistency involved: one street name is displayed in Swedish and another one in Finnish, even though they both have both Finnish and Swedish names. Neither is known to be commonly referred with its Swedish name (e.g. Mannerheimvägen (Swedsih) & Aleksanterinkatu (Finnish)). So far I haven't figured out whether anything can be done about this major annoyance or should we just start waiting for another 2 years for MapPoint 2006 (maybe by then Microsoft manages to include data for the remaining 80% of Finland's land area). It's sad the MapPoint Europe is still pretty much a joke compared to MapPoint America.