Did anyone ever work out a way to switch place names off?

I have a small project, but the whole question of switching place names off could cancel the whole thing!

It is a shame, because it is the type of thing that Bill&Co would like as an example of how to use Office to save time. We put our data in Excel, add a little logic to Excel to collate the data, then plot it in MapPoint - a few hours work, and a pretty straight-to-the-point map that could provide future insights.
There are a few road-bumps of course, but most I think I can work around. Displaying place names is a problem though.

Richard

Hi Richard,

Unfortunately there's no way to get the place names switched off completely.. you might take a look at the Microsoft Map technology found in Excel 97-2000.

Also, there are Visio templates for mapping and you might also take a look at MapInfo.. I've done some pretty nifty automated mapping applications with MapInfo, it's expensive and in some ways harder to work with than MapPoint, but you have much finer control over the display. It can be fully automated from VB or VBA through OLE automation like MapPoint.

Eric

Thanks Eric, It sounds like the best I could do (certain zoom settings and small font) might be acceptable.

I've just had a play with Excel Map. Could be useful in some circumstances, but I couldn't work out how to plot data keyed on Texas Counties...

Now it looks like the resulting map is going to be reproduced in print, so we have to make it monochrome. Might have to use a paint program to substitute colours. Good thing it is a one-off job
(buying MapInfo would be too much for a one-off like this)


Richard

The map has been delivered. In the end I did a lot of modification using a paint program (Picture Publisher), which was also required to change the colour shading. The final map is to be published in a scientific journal, so monochrome hatch patterns were required.

Rather than plotting a county-level shaded map, I had to use the Territories because we had about a dozen classifications to plot. This actually produced a map that was more pleasing to the client (effectively highlighting the counties with non-zero data), so we kept it even when we switched what we were plotting to something that required five classifications.

The maps plotted the distribution of a genus of orchid across Texas.
I may add it as an example to my website at a later date - especially if we go-ahead with the current idea of plotting Dallas County occurrences with a pushpin map.


Richard