Friday - January 11, 2013

Mapping Goals for 2013, Developing the MapPoint State Identification Game

Welcome to another issue of the MP2Kmag Update. A belated Happy New Year! Hope you are having success with your New Year's Resolutions and reaping the benefits.

In this issue we ask you to share your mapping goals for 2013 and would like to hear how we here at MP2Kmag and the community at MapForums.com might be help you acheive your goals.

Also, there are two new articles on how the State Identification Game was set up and developed. The game was first released in the last newsletter, but this is the first time the complete, uncompiled code has been made available. Although a fun challenge in and of itself, the solution demonstrates a simple but powerful framework to automate MapPoint from Excel using a custom form.

MP2K Magazine is your source for independent news and information about MapPoint and other Microsoft mapping technologies and we also host the popular web forum for MapPoint users and developers (www.mapforums.com).

This Issue's Contents at a Glance
- Recent Forum Highlights
- What are your Mapping Goals for 2013?
- TIP: Use Map Settings to Clean Up Your Map
- Get Published in MP2K Magazine
Articles
- Setting Up the State Identification Game
- Developing the State Identification Game

Happy Mapping and please forward this newsletter to anyone who would be interested!

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Features

Recent Forum Highlights

Here are some higlights from MapForums over the last couple months. MapForums is an active community of MapPoint and other mapping software developers and users. If you are a heavy or even occasional user of MapPoint and other mapping software, it would be worth your time to Introduce Yourself and post your nagging questions, share solutions, and get connected with others in your industry or using MapPoint in similar ways.

• State Identification Game Excel VBA code now published
  
• Using Pie Charts in MapPoint to show overlapping Pushpin Data
• Multi-point Routing Solution Needed
  
• The Map a Single County template now available for Microsoft MapPoint 2013
• Using DisplayDataMap in VBA to create unsized pie charts in MapPoint
  
• Showing multiple sets of data on a single map using Shaded Areas and Shaded Circles
• Microsoft MapPoint Training Class Available in the UK - Banbury, Thursday, January 31st
  
• MapPoint Crashing Intermittently on Link Data Update
  

Have a MapPoint Question or have Mapping or Technology News to share? Register for free and then post in the appropriate forum section:

MapPoint Desktop, Bing Maps, Articles, News & Announcements, MapPoint Consultants & Companies, MapPoint Add-ins, General Chat & Introductions, MapForums Downloads, MapForums Store

What are your Mapping Goals for 2013?

Diet and exercise are among the most common New Year's resolutions, but setting business and career goals are certainly up there. As most of our readers would probably agree, use of business mapping technologies like MapPoint can be a big part of that.

Given that, what do you want to accomplish with MapPoint or mapping in the next year? Use of smarter macros, new custom symbols or figuring out better ways to depict data, training for yourself or co-workers or your employees, use of algorithms for clustering or territory assignment? Post here or drop us a e-mail at goals@mp2kmag.com.

TIP: Use Map Settings to Clean Up Your Map

The purpose of this TIP is to show how you can get this map, with the default map style and setting...



to look like this less cluttered map...



Instructions and more details are found in the Tips & Tricks section on MapForums.com.

Get Published in MP2K Magazine

If you have a MapPoint presentation, neat programming technique, or would simply like to share the ways in which you are using MapPoint technology or any other ideas, contact us to discuss how we can turn your knowledge into an article and share your experience with the rest of the MapPoint community of users and developers.

Thanks to Marvin Hlavac for allowing us to use the picture on the right of his Maltese puppy eating from the MapPoint mug.

"The "State Identification Game" was released in 2012 and has gotten a lot of attention from both gamers and developers.

"The concept is the game is very simple. The game shows the outline of a random U.S. state and asks you to identify the state. The outline of the state and surrounding states as well as water bodies (major lakes and oceans) can all be used as clues to identify the state. It sounds simple, but I did in fact miss a few before practicing a little bit.

"The compiled game can be downloaded here -- State Identification Game Using MapPoint

"In this article, we will publish the code used to set up the game as well as the code for the game itself."

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Developing the State Identification Game


"Since the publication and release of the game in late 2012, the State Identification Game quickly became the most popular download of all time on MapForums.

"The State Identification Game was developed using Excel VBA and MapPoint. The MapPoint version must be at least 2010 as it was in this version that you were first able to manipulate map layers and turn off labels. Excel versions tested include 2007 and 2010, but I don't see a reason why it should not work with earlier versions of Excel.

"Since the released of the compiled game, several developers have asked, and I have previously shared the code privately, but now for the first time in this article, we are now making the full source code for the game available for public download."

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