Information About (and Update Procedures for) Microsoft Mapping Products

Links To Locations Lower Down On This Page.

• Advanced Features of MapPoint Compared To Streets/Autoroute
• Cheap Data Updates for MapPoint
• Save Disk Space
• Amateur Radio & APRS Applications 
   

Introduction and General Information

Microsoft publishes 4 very similar-looking  desktop mapping products.

For North America:

• Streets & Trips
   
• MapPoint North America

For Europe:

• AutoRoute
   
• MapPoint Europe

All versions show a simple outline map of the world when zoomed and scrolled outside of their target coverage areas. National borders show along with a surprisingly large number of cities shown as point objects, but no road detail or internal subdivisions such as provinces, parishes, counties, states, etc. 

• The North American versions provide continuous seamless street-level coverage of all of the U.S, and Canada.  Major-highways-only show in Mexico, except in the Mexico City capital district where full street level detail shows when zoomed in.
   
• The European versions cover all of the countries of Western Europe continuously at street level detail. With each release, more of the eastern European countries are beginning to appear with increasing detail. In some counties, only major highways show in one release with more detail the following year. In others, only major highways show in most of the country, with street level detail only in major cities.

Streets & Trips and Autoroute are consumer versions of these programs and sell typically for USD $30-$40.  The two versions of MapPoint are considered business-oriented programs (they integrate themselves with Microsoft Office when installed), and sell for USD $250-300. MapPoint contains numerous data import and analysis tools not present in Streets or Autoroute. MapPoint is designed to communicate with other programs while Streets/Autoroute can't.  Streets/Autoroute is released in a new version with updated road and points-of-interest data every year. MapPoint is only updated every two years on the even-numbered years.

On-screen, the programs look nearly identical. (Click Here for comparative screen shots of Streets & Trips and MapPoint. Opens in new window.)  All the programs have the same basic drawing and annotation tools that allow you to mark up maps with lines, circles, boxes, text notes, highlighted routes, etc. (It's actually the same drawing toolbar that appears in MS Word or Excel.) Annoyingly, the overlay files these markups (and any plotted points) are saved into are different for each version of the programs, even though the contents are essentially the same. 

Streets & Trips saves into files with the extension .est.  Autoroute saves into files with the extension .axe.  Both versions of MapPoint save into files with the extension .ptm .  The internal format of these files change with every new version of each program; i.e. you can't open an overlay file in a version of the program older than the one that created it. (You can read older overlays in newer versions of each program, but you can't save any changes back to the older formats.)  Streets and Autoroute can't open overlay files created in MapPoint.   MapPoint can read overlay files from Streets or Autoroute, but it can only save changes into it's current version of .ptm .   Thus for overlay file exchange purposes, an old version of Streets/Autoroute produces universally-readable overlay files.  A new version of MapPoint is a universal recipient.

Although the data is stored in incompatible files, the data (draw objects, recorded GPS tracks, etc) itself is transferable via the Windows Clipboard. If both Streets/Autoroute and MapPoint are installed on the same system, you can start both programs at the same time. You can then copy from one program ("Edit, Copy" or Cntrl-C) and paste ("Edit,Paste" or Cntrl-V) to the other. All objects automatically place themselves in exactly the same position on the receiving program.

You can import simple files (Excel spreadsheets or comma-delimited text files) containing lists of addresses or lat/long coordinate pairs into any of these programs.   Note that plotting street addresses (a.k.a "geocoding" data) will only be approximate. These mapping programs don't actually know the exact location of each street address. Rather, the internal database only has the beginning and ending address numbers on each side of a "street segment" (typically a city block, sometimes several city blocks, or even several miles/kilometers in rural areas). They then interpolate where a given address "should be" based on the known start and end addresses of the segment. Quite often, street-address-based geocoding will produce an error of a block or more if the house numbering isn't linear and consistent.   These same issues apply to the millions of "points-of-interest" (gas stations, hotels/motels, restaurants, etc) addresses provided with these programs. It's sometimes a bit of a "treasure hunt" locating places shown on the map when you arrive in a strange city, when they may be off by a block or more.

On the other hand, GPS-generated lat/long coordinates plot very precisely, as long as the GPS is set to the default WGS84 datum that all the maps in these programs are based on.

Advanced Features of MapPoint Compared to Streets or Autoroute

In Streets/Autoroute, imported data points become simple generic identical "pushpin" symbols. MapPoint provides multiple ways for external data to be imported, analyzed, and displayed on top of it's maps. In MapPoint, the size, color or symbol type can be varied based on the values in other fields of the list being read; i.e. it does "thematic mapping". For example, you can place house icons on the map based on address, and then color-code them (or vary the size) based on the selling price. Once plotted, MapPoint allows you to select groups of plotted objects based on state, county or postal district lines, or arbitrarily-drawn "regions".  For example, you could plot the sales of individual stores in several counties by varying the the size of the individual icons based on sales volume. You could then color-code county-area overlays based on the total sales volume of all the stores inside that particular county.

Further, MapPoint has an extensive API (Applications Programming Interface) that allows external programs to pass data directly to MapPoint in real time via Windows DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) and command MapPoint to draw/plot it in various ways. It is this API that allows outside (non-Microsoft) developers to create custom applications for MapPoint such as vehicle location systems, 911 answering point displays, WiFi-hotspot survey systems, etc. Such applications can either show up as separate applications, or appear as plug-ins (i.e. new menu pull-downs) inside of MapPoint. In this respect, MapPoint is similar to Microsoft Word and Excel. The programming interfaces and macro languages of these two programs have created an entire industry of third-party developers writing add-ons, scripts and plug-ins for these programs.

Cheap Updates for MapPoint

Despite the huge differences in program features, the underlying map databases in the programs are the same (as is the online version of MapPoint, Expedia.com). You can use the data files from a recent version of the inexpensive Streets/Autoroute to update older versions of MapPoint (or older versions of Streets/Autoroute). 

[You might want to update an older version of Streets or Autoroute rather than install the complete new version in order to avoid the massive amount of additional "bloatware" that the latest versions of Streets/Autoroute try to dump onto your hard drive. These include voice-command functions (for real time GPS navigation), subscription-based real-time traffic data services from Microsoft (that also requires that you purchase a special radio receiver), and the undisclosed privacy-invading stealth install of Microsoft Location Finder. "Location Finder" places a password-protected 64MB database of known WiFi hotspots on your hard drive.  It then recruits you as an unwitting volunteer in updating this database by "phoning home" your location to Microsoft any time you have both a GPS and and a WiFi connection running on the computer. This noxious piece of near-spyware has been a part of Streets and MapPoint since the 2006 releases.

Another reason for updating and older Streets/Autoroute (rather than installing the new Streets/Autoroute) is that the 2008 versions will no longer install on Windows 2000. Part of the 2008 install is the forced install of Internet Explorer 7.0, which only works with Windows XP or Vista. Even though the install won't run on Windows 2000, the data is compatible with earlier versions of Streets/Autoroute running on Windows 2K. ]

To perform the update:

1. Shut down any running copies of Streets/Autoroute/MapPoint that may be running. This includes any applications that depend on MapPoint such as APRSpoint or UIpoint.
    
2. Insert the Streets or Autoroute CD or DVD into the drive. Cancel the install routine that will try to run automatically when the disk is inserted. Note that in the two-disk-based CD-ROM-based version of MapPoint (i.e. not DVD), part of the data is on disk 1 and part is on disk 2 of the set. The path to the data is the same on both.
    
3. Start the Windows File Explorer or My Computer and browse the CD. Navigate your way to the folder
      \MSMap\PFiles\MSMap\Data   Yes this tortured path with two folders named "MSMap" in cascade actually exists!
   
   
    
4. Select all the files in the folder. If you are using the 2008 edition of Streets or later, select all the files except for "GasStati.mdb" and "Traffic.mdb". (These are only used by a subscription-based datacasting service that transmits real time traffic data and gas prices, operated by Microsoft, that is bundled as an extra feature with the 2008 version of the program.  They are useless with older versions of Streets or MapPoint, and just waste 35 MB of disk space.) Do an "Edit, Copy" (or Cntrl-C) on the selected files.
    
5. Locate the Streets or MapPoint installation on your hard drive. Navigate to the folder \DATA located under the main program folder for Streets or MapPoint. You should see similarly-named files in this folder. Do an Edit, Paste (or Cntrl-V) to paste the files from the CD to the hard disk. Answer "Yes" each time a warning about "Do you wish to replace this file?" appears.
   
   
    
6. Restart MapPoint.  Look for some landmark or new road that should have changed since the previous edition to confirm that the database is indeed updated.

Save Huge Amounts of Hard Disk Space

Streets, Autoroute and MapPoint each copy over a gigabyte of program files and data to your hard disk when installed completely on the hard disk. (An install option is to leave about 700 MB of data on the CD/DVD. This then requires that the data disk be in the drive when using the program.)

Streets or Autoroute, and it's corresponding area MapPoint are so similar that they can be installed into the same folder so that they can share one copy of the database and some of the supporting program components. Installed this way, the two programs occupy a total of about 1.3GB hard disk space instead of over 2.2 GB for normal individual installs.

To do a combined program install, one should preferably use a copy of Streets or Autoroute and MapPoint from the same year. For example, Streets 2004 and MapPoint North America 2004, or Autoroute 2006 and MapPoint Europe 2006. Some combinations of different years will work; one of my installations uses Streets 2005 and MapPoint 2004.

Install Streets or Autoroute first. Opt for a custom install and name the install folder "StreetsPoint"  for North America or "RoutePoint" for Europe.  Then run the MapPoint install, opt again for a custom install, and install into the same folder.

Once the combined install is completed, the latest data from a copy of Streets or Autoroute each year will now update both programs at once!  The only side effect of the combined install that I can detect is that the construction data updates that download current highway department construction zones (so the Route Planner feature can route around construction delays) no longer works in some configurations.

Amateur Radio and APRS Applications

MapPoint (but not Streets or Autoroute) is usable directly by least three amateur radio APRS applicatons.   

Because Streets & Trips and Autoroute lack the software interface required for external programs to talk to them (that MapPoint has), they can not be used directly by any APRS program.

Streets (or Autoroute) is only useful for updating the database of MapPoint as described above, or as a source of screen captures of static (fixed non-zooming non-scrolling) maps for use with other programs.

• UIview can pass it's received position reports to MapPoint (either the North American or European version) via the UI-Point "middle-ware" plug-in. Launching UI-Point from the "File" menu inside UIview causes an application (that is actually MapPoint minus some of it's toolbar buttons) to appear. This modified version of MapPoint, with all of it's normal menu pulldowns replaced with new ones, operates along side of UIview.  
  
  The maps displayed in MapPoint are independent of any maps running normally inside UIview.  UIpoint plots standard UIview icons on the MapPoint display, but alphanumeric overlay characters that appear on top of the base icons on maps inside UIview don't show on the MapPoint display.  None of the other UIview plug-ins or enhancements that add track lines, range circles, weather alerting zones, overlay objects, etc to maps inside UIview will have any effect on the external UI-Point/MapPoint display.
  
  Note that APRS position reports received from the APRS Internet system (rather than off-the-air from a radio/TNC) don't appear by default.  Pull down "Options, Traffic Filter" from the UI-Point menu bar. Clear the check box for "Don't Display Internet Traffic". 
       MapPoint is a large and rather slow program. When UI-Point was first released years ago, the author was concerned that the typical PC used by hams wasn't fast enough to keep up with the flood of data from the APRS Internet system,while running the sluggish MapPoint. As a result, he defaulted Internet display to off.  (The over-the-air data rate is only 1200 baud and is no challenge for even slow PCs to keep up with.) Today, with fast PCs on broadband connections with port 14580 selective filtering of the Internet stream, UIview and UI-Point have no problem keeping up with the Internet data.
   
• APRSpoint is essentially a MapPoint plug-in that actually turns MapPoint itself into an APRS program. It is easy to use (it has the normal MapPoint user interface, with added menus) and draws very nice track lines of the course of travel of moving vehicles being followed with APRS.  However, it doesn't support the complete APRS symbol set and uses non-standard icons for many of the symbols it does support. Further, it doesn't support alphanumeric overlay characters on top of base symbols, as required by the current APRS standard.  APRSpoint doesn't support the KISS interface or intelligent digipeating. 
   
• AGW Tracker (From the author of the AGW Packet Engine soundcard "softmodem" for packet) is a relatively new APRS client program that can use MapPoint as it's display engine.  AGW Tracker passes data to MapPoint via MapPoint's native COM interface so MapPoint operates completely normally. No toolbars disappear and no new or modified new ones appear.   However, AGW Tracker doesn't support the complete APRS symbol set and uses non-standard icons for many of the symbols it does support.  Further, it doesn't support alphanumeric overlay characters on top of base symbols, as required by the current APRS standard.

Note: The APRS standard provides for overlaying a single letter or number on top of the basic APRS symbol (a.ka. "icon") These overlay characters are used, for example, to distinguish home WIDE1-1 fill-in digipeaters (number "1"overlaid on the digi star symbol) from wide-area digipeaters (letter "N" for WIDEn-N overlaid on the star symbol).   They are also used for distinguishing Echolink ("E"), IRLP ("I") and Winlink ("W") nodes by overlaying the generic black diamond "node" symbol. Without the overlays, half the information about the object on the map is being lost.

More details on the standard APRS symbol set and the overlay technique are here on this website.