MapPoint Database

Hey all,

I was just wondering if there is a way to achieve route distances from the MapPoint database without actually opening MapPoint. If that isnt possible, is there a way to speed up the Mapping process... basically I wrote a program that achieves a bunch of distances and I was wondering if there was a quicker way to do it if I have a large amount of data. Thanks.

No - MapPoint needs to load in order to compute routes/distances.

For bulk calculations, you might try the Winwaed MileCharter product:
MileCharter: Home Page (http://www.milecharter.com)

Other than that, if you have programming skills you could write your own program to perform route calculations while mappoint is non-visible, and feed it each route from your database of waypoints. This would dramatically speed-up the process.

HTH
Paul

Thanks for the mention, Paul!

Yes you can run MapPoint in the background, and this removes the overhead of displaying the route map - however, the speed-up is not huge. Very rough testing a few years back came out with the display time taking up about a quarter or a third of the complete route calculation time.
I would expect this proportion to be higher for shorter routes, because shorter routes are much quicker to calculate...

Richard