Microsoft MapPoint 2010 [Old Version]

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Product Feature

• Microsoft MapPoint 2010 lets you visualize business data, communicate insights with instant impact, and integrate maps into the work you do in Microsoft Office
• Create maps using custom Map Settings to display your data with only the details you want to appear--easily turn labels on or off, change font style or map style
• Combine business data with included demographics to target potential customers and focus decisions; dramatically improve decision-making by bringing clarity to tabular data
• Use information-rich maps to illuminate important data relationships, identify business trends, and illustrate opportunities
• Create sales territories and share performance maps to clearly visualize, analyze, and communicate business information

Product Description

Gives you the power to visualize business data, communicate insights with instant impact, and integrate maps into the work you do in Microsoft Office.

Microsoft MapPoint 2010 [Old Version] Review

First, I recommend that you download the free full-featured 60-day trial and experiment before deciding whether to purchase. Except for the download time, installation is easy (trivial). The trial's reminders occur only when you start the app. If you decide to buy, activation is trivial--simply enter the key.

I got this package (for review) primarily for the "visualize business data" aspect advertised. What it turned out to be was an inconsequential update of what I remember of Microsoft Streets & Trips circa 2004. Then, the only reason I ever used S&T over online maps was to display address info from a simple spreadsheet. Recently, some of my colleagues would have benefited from importing spreadsheets with address info into a map application. When they tried to do this in Google Maps, their (understandable) reaction was best summed up by "Google doesn't want people like us to use this" and "Life is too short". Although MapPoint 2010 is "integrated" with MS Office, that integration fails far short of their needs: The data you can import into a map, and what you can do with it inside this app, is so severely constrained that I don't see any benefit to their types of tasks.

The maps themselves are of poor visual quality, especially the poor contrast. Some labels are medium gray against a light olive background. I routinely missed items I was looking for, not just labels, but push-pins and even bar charts. The characters in the labels are akin to what you got from a very low-resolution printer, one where the jagged edges from the pixels are readily apparent. Because of this, my sense is that as you scan the map the street labels--being at various angles--can slide from being perceived as text to being simply noise in the background.

I don't see myself using MapPoint 2010--for the things I do, it is no better, and often worse, than free Web-based resources. My key requirement was to be able to augment the places in the database, both annotating the ones they provide and adding places of my own, and then be able to execute searches against this augmented database. MapPoint supports none of the former and its searches ignore any tags, keywords and other annotations you might attach to an entry via the free-format field (searches are limited to name and city).

Note that Windows 7 is not on the list of supported operating systems. This could be an inadvertent omission in keeping with the lack of attention to detail in this product.

The remainder of this review gives details of the problems I found. Note: When I say that MapPoint cannot do something, it should be taken to include that I couldn't find how to do it. The "documentation" is limited to the usual Microsoft Help topics - snippets that help with potential terminological confusions and with finding items that are deeply buried in the menus, but mostly tell you what is blindingly obvious.
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The user interface is badly inconsistent and is clearly a mash-up. For example, in Find Nearby Places, a single-click on the name of a restaurant in the LHS pane produces a small semi-transparent box on the map showing its location, and a double-click produces the display of the information in an opaque box, but for other categories, such as Pharmacies and Schools, a single-click produces nothing. Another example: Some of the sub-panes in the LHS navigation pane are dismissed by clicking the "x" in an upper corner, others on the side (different icon), while yet others use a pop-up menu. Another example: The Undo capability applies to some categories and not others, without any discernible logic.

There are lots of little UI annoyances. For example, when the cursor gets within 16 pixels of an edge of the map, it turns into a large arrow, signaling that clicking the mouse will scroll the map. However, MapPoint doesn't seem to take that margin into account when calculating where to position clickable content, and I found myself too often having to scroll the map to be able to click on such items and then scrolling the map back to the original position.

The maps themselves were troublesome. I could not find how to display municipal boundaries. Names of cities were hard to find among all the other labels. Minor adjustments to the map would cause "strobing", for example, clicking on a balloon could radically alter which street labels were displayed. This was disconcerting when working on a map of a city I was familiar with, but for a city I was unfamiliar with, this was frustrating ("Where is Center Street? I thought it was on this map just a second ago."). Aside: You see bad choices of what to label on the world map as well, for example in looking at the Pacific, you find that the "Palau" label (tiny island nation) extends over the (unlabeled) Philippines.
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Map items--balloons/push-pins--that you import from a spreadsheet onto the map are limited to 8 fields: 2 are for names, 5 are address components and 1 is for your use (free-form data). The caption displayed when you selected a balloon is a small fixed size, so there is truncation of the info that you enter in these fields. Although there is plenty of room in the LHS navigation pane, only the first 8 entries are listed, rather than having a scroll-able list. Names have no structure, for example, if your database/spreadsheet has separate fields for first and last names, you need to merge those fields before importing (there is a second Name field, but it is not included in what is displayed in the navigation pane). Similarly, if you have a contact person in a department in a company, you need to combine them into a single name field. Similarly if your database uses multiple fields for street addresses (common because it simplifies validating data entry and selecting sections of a street). MapPoint does NOT support importing email addresses (other than as plain text in the free-format field), but it does allow you to enter Web addresses into the free-form field and it does recognize those and make them click-able, but it is so kludgy that it comes across as a quick patch (in a location's Properties window there is a non-functional text-entry field for the URL). The balloons/push-pins are in such muted colors that it was easy to overlook some of them.

Note: If you want to import a subset of data from your address book/contact manager application, the XLS or CSV file that it creates is likely to have similar problems. Since Outlook is/was part of the MS Office suite, I had expected at least that its export format would be directly import-able into MapPoint.

When importing data from a spreadsheet, MapPoint does some corrections. For street suffixes--St, Ave, Rd, Lane, Way, Circle,...-it did a good job on the spreadsheets I used as tests (from real-world applications). However, my city is not a difficult case: Except for cul-de-sacs, there are no name conflicts between categories--for example, there isn't a First St and a (perpendicular) First Ave--and circumstances mean that the street numbers in those cul-de-sacs are rarely (never?) possible ones on the corresponding main street. However, the correction algorithm is very simplistic and makes lots of mistakes. For example, in importing 250 addresses within my city, two entries were missing the city field. One street name was very unusual and the city was guessed correctly, but the other had a street name of "Lincoln" and the guesses were all from the other side of the country--MapPoint did not use either the addresses already imported or the locale being displayed on the map to bias its guesses. Similarly on the misspelled street name "Bryon": MapPoint guessed "Bryson" from a nearby ZIP Code rather than "Byron" from the Zip Code given in the entry. Corrections are limited to selecting one of its guesses: If it guesses badly, you have to tell it to skip the whole entry rather than providing guidance or a manual correction. For a product that prominently advertises its integration with MS Office, I expected it to offer the option to have corrections also be made to the spreadsheet being imported. But MapPoint does not even log the corrections being made so that you can later update the spreadsheet yourself--you need to manually create that list as the error messages are displayed.

Because of the constraints on the data you can import into a map, I would likely do my filtering of my dataset within the spreadsheet, using MapPoint only to create the map to be printed or exported into an MS Office document. Because I can't import data directly from my spreadsheet and database formats (names and addresses need to be collapsed), it is pointless to do any updates to the data within MapPoint because the exported format would require difficult processing to get back to the underlying format.
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FIND: The Help topics state that the Find operation connects to the Internet. For me, it only searched the program's database. For added items, it searched the name field, but not the free-form text field.

The Find operation cannot be geographically limited, for example, to the area of the map currently being displayed or a ZIP Code. You _can_ include the city name as a search term, but it is subjected to the same fuzzy matching as other search terms. Adding a street name or ZIP Code to the search terms produces substantially _worse_ results, indicating that those fields are ignored by search. Example: "peet's coffee, palo alto" produces 6 matches (the 3 sought, 1 understandable, 2 inexplicable). Add the ZIP Code of one of them ("94306") and there are over 130 hits.

Note: The SEARCH icon on the toolbar seems to have no real purpose: It brings up a LHS pane for "Search results", but nothing seems to use it--the FIND operation (on "Tools", not the normal location of "Edit") pops up a window of results.
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On the Streets&Trips aspect of this package: Route planning and related tasks dominate the tool bar. For example, sending to your GPS and phone _each_ have an icon on the toolbar (rather than being on the "Send to..." submenu of the main menu), as does Route Planning, Directions, Nearby Places, and controlling a GPS device (if your computer has one). Plus Coupons, a subscription service.

The database of places is dominated by restaurants and hotels. However, the (unchangeable) subcategorization of restaurants comes from a bygone era. For example, coffee shops, which are used by many for meetings and as substitute offices between appointments, would seem to deserve a separate category, but are lumped in category "Other", which is not part of the default display. The "Places" database doesn't contain some categories of businesses important to the road warrior, such as WiFi hotspots, copy/printing stores, and FedEx, UPS... drop offs and other packaging stores (it does have ATM locations).

While the entries for the businesses have telephone numbers, they do not have URLs or email or ..., and does not allow you to add them.

The database appears to be about 4 years out-of-date based upon a sampling of the comings and goings of businesses near me. There are numerous errors in the database that indicate it was sloppily assembled. For example, major restaurant chains are in the wrong categories (Taco Bell, Chili's, Baja Fresh are classified as "Other" rather than "Mexican"; similarly "Dominos" and "Little Caesars" are not under "Pizza"). And restaurants whose names have obvious keywords identifying their category--like "Taqueria", "Taco", "Pizza" and "BBQ"--wind up in the "Other" category. I could not find any way to correct the errors in places--closed business, address errors, classification errors--nor to add businesses to the existing categories, nor to add one's own notes about these businesses. It is _possible_ to report errors about these Places, but the design discourages this: It is not on the menu that comes up for the place item, but rather on a Help menu - the one on the top menu bar, not the Help icon on the big toolbar.

On (uncorrected) address errors for place names: I see errors for businesses that have been at their location for decades. Example, one of my city's business districts is on _South_ California Avenue, with all of N. Cal Ave being residential, and consequently these business addresses are routinely referred to without the "South" component. In the MapPoint database, some of these businesses are placed on the "North" segment - my guess is that the listing didn't specify direction and it unwisely defaulted, and used "North". In a city you are familiar with, such mistakes are easy to recognize. But for an unfamiliar city - where a map application is important--such errors can be major headaches.

If you are in a unfamiliar city, using the visual display to find an appropriate nearby restaurant is not a helpful as you would expect: Because of the too few categories and the miscategorizations, you need to include "Other" in the display and this results in a map cluttered with coffee shops and the big national fast-food chains (since restaurants tend to cluster).

I live next to the Stanford (University) Research Park which has numerous headquarters for high-tech companies and major law firms. Only six of these appear in the database and they are under "Landmarks" which means that they are simply named points on the map (no address or other info). As I changed the scale of the map, items in the Landmark category appeared and disappeared, while items in other categories, such as restaurants and hotels, were persistent. The Landmarks category appears to be the catch-all for suggestions: There are multiple variants on a company's name (eg, short vs full), company names with incorrect capitalization, and entries that were omitted from their correct categories (eg, the courthouse, one of the small (retail) art galleries).
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On driving directions: I experimented with several routes where I knew that I deviated from the recommendations, and I was able to make my changes by dragging. However, this failed badly in one case where I advise visitors to take a route that starts by going _away_ from the destination (the route recommended by map apps has high risk of visitors missing their turns). My attempt to modify the route by dragging simply produced a loop that returned close to the starting point before continuing on the recommended route. Attempting to fix this by dragging only made the matter worse (these changes are not undo-able). I had similar problems when I played out a scenario where I knew the preferred freeway was clogged (eg, major accident) and I wanted to take a parallel freeway that was 4-5 miles away. Note that various of the online map services have similar capabilities to modify routes by dragging.
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DEMOGRAPHIC DATA is one of the advertised features of MapPoint. The Help topic simply points you at the home page for the provider (Applied Geographic Solution). I found descriptions of the dataset, but nothing on how to _use_ MapPoint on that data. Trying to use this feature, I ran into so many problems that I found it hard to believe that anyone had seriously used it before it was released and thus I gave up because I had no confidence in the results produced.

The program assumes that you are interested in demographics for the whole US, not a particular area. When you select a demographic, the map view is reset to the North American view and you must manually return to your selected view to see the results you are interested in. This annoyance indicates the probable absence of any real testing. The bigger problem is the suggested scales are based on national, not local, maximums. For example, I plotted number of households of given sizes by ZIP Code and MapPoint suggested a scale of 35,000 which produced bar charts with barely visible bars--the largest locally are only 15% of that value. Since you can't adjust such choices after you see the results, you apparently need to discard the map and start from scratch. Aside: Additional evidence of the large-scale emphasis is that it uses the term "minor city" for ones with population of 100-500K, and "town" for smaller ones.

When displaying demographic information by Census Tract or ZIP Code, the map does not show the boundaries of those areas. This can lead to some surprises. For example, it appeared that my side of my neighborhood had twice the household income of the remainder, which I immediately doubted. When I went to a map where I could display Census Track boundaries, I discover that a few blocks on two edges of the neighborhood were part of a census tract that ran for 17 miles along the foothills, incorporating several very wealthy enclaves and then turned and jumped across almost two miles of non-residential space (commercial, expressway, greenbelt, Interstate) to reach my neighborhood. I looked at various other local census tracts and found that some of them also varied significantly from the "natural" boundaries.

Multiple selectors: When you apply the first selector, it produces a bar graph of the _count_ of such people, but when you then add a second selector, the bar graph shows _percentages_. For example, if you ask for the number of people in each of the age groups and then add the selector of home ownership, the each bar in the graph is the percentage of people in each age category who are homeowners (counts are in the accompanying text). I could not find a way to get graphs showing the _counts_ for two or more selectors, which I expect is the information more likely to be of interest to businesses.

When you use multiple selectors on demographic data, you need to track it yourself: The chain cannot be recovered from MapPoint. You cannot edit the chain. I thought I could change the format of how results were displayed by reapplying the condition with the new format specified, but that produced a display where all areas had the same result, 100%, demonstrating that conditions are applied to the previous _results_ rather than being added to the _query_ made to the database.
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Although you can _draw_ regions on the map, they cannot be used to select data. TERRITORIES have to be constructed from one type of predefined geographic units, the smallest being Census Tracts and ZIP Codes. These labels can be very hard to find, being displayed in a smaller font without much contrast to the background. Note that cities are not one of the geographic units, and realize that while ZIP Codes often provide a good-enough alternative, they can cross city and even county boundaries. Although "Metropolitan area" is one of the offered geographic units, I was never able to find a label corresponding to one (my area has three Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs): San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland).

Before discovering the constraint on territories, I was hoping to use that feature for several local civic groups for which I provide tech support.
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The icons on the toolbar are not the visual style you would expect for a business application. First, they are much larger than equivalent icons from modern programs. Second, their style is more of a throwback to icons used for low-end computer games of about a decade ago - I presume they were plucked from a library of icons. While the icons themselves have little impact on the workings on the app, their choice does imply deficiencies in the background of the product's managers (When I was developing software, these were issues that marketing, sales and the developers all took very seriously because we had seen how important a first-impression they were).
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Much of the US demographic data is from the 2000 Census and the 2007 update, but some data is from the 1990 Census (apparently from questions that were not carried forward into the 2000 Census).

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