Description:
Business users seeking the shortest route between two points-of-purchase should examine Microsoft MapPoint 2002. It has all the standard features a business map user would expect--place finder, route planner, mileage calculator, and so on--but also permits extensive data manipulation throughout the United States and Canada. Installation is a breeze, and setting up the program to any user's specifications should take only a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the nature of imported data. Once it's running, MapPoint will pay for itself quickly with improved sales and marketing reports, trip planning, and projections. The interface will be intimately familiar to Office users, so importing and exporting files and data is painless. The look and feel of other Office-suite programs is preserved--the learning curve of nonstandard tools and features is quite gentle. One extremely powerful new feature is territory creation, which allows user-defined, overlaying boundaries that are simple to create manually or compose from pre-existing data. Combining territorial categories with the vast reams of census and demographic data contained within MapPoint should yield plenty of fresh business ideas. Nonbusiness users should pick up some much cheaper trip planning software; the most expensive features of MapPoint will offer little of value to them. --Rob Lightner
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