MAPPOINT Q & A

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389 Alex - September 11, 2001

As it stands now, most locations that I feed MapPoint have fully resolved addresses but there are always those for which I have only a general idea of the area for any given reason - wasn't written down, not posted, or MapPoint will not recognize what is a proper address. For those, I play pin the tail on the MapPoint, and extract out the Longitude/Latitude using one of the available hacks to get the location in the right ball park. The problem comes when it's time to import the data in mass. If I map both the L/L & Address fields, it matches only for L/L. I have to reimport the same list twice using different field mapping settings to get all of the data onto the map. This still doesn't cut it however because, outside of being a PITA, the data cannot be analyzed as a whole. MapPoint will not recognize, for painfully obvious reasons I guess, pins from different sets when matched with different settings, as compatible for analysis. If I could find a way to collapse different data sets into one after matching, perhaps that would do. Much better, it would seem, would be to have the program sort it out on the front end.

Answer:

With the functionality that MapPoint offers currently, the best solution would be to generate lat/lon values for ALL of your records, and then bring all your data back into MapPoint as a single data set using lat/lon as the geographic marker. This is a bit of extra work (having to import, calculate lat/lon, export, and re-import) but you do get the single-dataset analysis capability you are looking for.

The other option would be to extract the data as separate datasets and somehow merge them in Excel before doing the analysis, but I would guess that is not a good solution.

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