Microsoft MapPoint 2000

On June 10, 1999, Microsoft enters the field of business geographics with MapPoint 2000, a desktop mapping program that was created to work with the Microsoft Office suite of tools for everyday mapping needs. While MapPoint is a powerful desktop utility, it is certainly nowhere nearly as powerful as the two most popular computerized mapping (GIS) programs on the market today, ArcView and MapInfo. Then again, at a suggested retail price of $109, MapPoint provides a whole lot of bang for the buck with powerful address matching and demographic mapping tools.

Though once can visit a myriad of web sites to locate a street address, MapPoint's address lookup feature is extremely fast, detailed, and accurate. The address search function is on the program's Office-style toolbar and allows searching of street addresses (within the U.S.), cities, states, and countries. The built-in geocoding (address matching and look-up) capabilities of MapPoint are excellent.

It was extremely simple to take a list of ZIP codes and plot them on the software. When the program was confused by five of my more than 500 ZIP codes, is asked me to pick a better match - by comparing the un-matched ZIP codes with the United States Postal Service database, I could see that the MapPoint database for ZIP codes wasn't completely up-to-date. However, the 99% accuracy that I found was just great. The plotting of ZIP Codes on MapPoint was far easier than creating a new DBase file and "joining" two attribute tables on ArcView.

Geocoded and plotted points are known as "pushpins" in MapPoint and that's exactly the symbol that is used on the map although a user has a plethora of choices for map markers, from happy faces to all sorts of sign symbols and colored dots.

The U.S. demographic data included with MapPoint is excellent - the data comes from Claritas, a leading demographic data company and not only provides 1990 Census data, it also provides 1998 estimates, and 2003 projections. The data is provided from the tract level to the state level for population, income, education, ethnicity, rent, and household size. International data is somewhat lacking and only provides country by country data for ten variables such as population, literacy, GNP per person, Internet access, and infant mortality. I was surprised and disappointed that the program does not include any road data for countries other than the United States, highlighting the product's emphasis as a business mapping program for the U.S. The United Kingdom version of MapPoint is expected to be the first international edition. Microsoft also hopes to expand the street network to include all of North America in future versions.

MapPoint offers a Data Mapping Wizard that uses the demographic data or imported data to create a "Shaded Area Map" (choropleth map), "Sized Circle Map" (graduated circles), "Shaded Circle Map," or "Pushpin Map." A description on the wizard tells the user which map to use based on what's being shown. When I attempted to create a map showing population by census tracts, the program froze on a 350 MHz machine with 96MB of RAM. However, choropleth maps of county, metropolitan areas, and states worked just great. The palette of colors is limited to 16 different choices and, unfortunately, the default color gradation for the maps is a gradual coloring showing the value for each region, instead of the cartographic norm of a discrete color value for a range.

One of the program's demonstrations on its self-guided tour includes routing for deliveries. The example shows how easy it is to import data from Excel and plot it on the map. The funny portion of the demo is how program suggests routings - it tells the user to select one of the drawing tools and to draw a line on the map showing the most efficient method of driving from location to location. Not quite the power of GIS but effective.

Using the drawing toolbar is similar to the drawing toolbar of other Microsoft programs and that makes for a slightly annoying experience with MapPoint 2000. If you're going to plot pushpins manually onto a map, you'll have to re-select the pushpin drawing tool for each pushpin, versus the tool remaining activated as you'd find in a graphics program.

Once a user creates a map, it's quite simple to print a map or even to convert the entire map to a HTML-based document for the web.

Overall, MapPoint 2000 is an impressive package for mapping tools and demographic data that make desktop mapping simple. I think it will be very useful for small and large businesses alike to analyze and map their day-to-day spatial data (and to even find new and exciting ways of presenting spatial data). Microsoft is certainly going to give ESRI (the maker of ArcView) and MapInfo a run for their money.

Though Microsoft's new Office 2000 is also released on June 10, MapPoint is not packaged with the new Office 2000 but will be sold separately.

Microsoft's MapPoint 2000 FAQ and home page are great resources.

My GIS category of Net Links provides background about computerized mapping.

Visit the Geography Bulletin Board to discuss any geographical topic.

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