MapForums

Is it possible to enter a City or Zip Code, and return a list of City and Zip Code w/in a specified proximity that I can export?

For example: I would like to enter "Denver" or "80206" and a range of 25 miles and retrieve a list of Zip Codes w/ City Name within that 25 mile reach. And then export that list to be used in a sql database.

I would experiment with the following. Use the data mapping feature to map some random demographic variable (like average income by Zip). Then pick your center, draw a radius circle, and use this to extract the demographics (Export to Excel). This gives you all a neat spreadsheet that lists all the ZIPs that have their centroid (centerpoint) inside the radius range. [This won't give you the city names, but you could extract this from the spreadsheet if you performed this same routine on a list of points of interest - there's an article y Chris Gebhardt on this site that explains how to extract the 800,000 points of interest from MapPoint...if you add them back in using the Import Data feature, you should be able to get the result you want!]

Thanks Eric,

I'm fairly new to this. I'm not even sure what Geocoding means. I tried dictionary.com, but to no avail.

I'm fairly compentent w/ VB. Can you give me a rough estimate to the amount of time it would take to do this?

Thanks,
Drew

This isn't native MapPoint functionality, you'd do it easier and cleaner (more intuitively) with MapInfo or another traditional GIS along with municipalities and zip code layers. There are some work-arounds that might enable you to achieve this with MapPoint alone, take a look at the techniques in our reverse geocoding articles (there are three of them dated Sept.-Oct. of last year). What I would suggest is generating a tight grid or lattice of lat/lons in the area that would be enscribed by the desired radius and then reverse-geocode and sort/group the results.