Review by J. Young

Though MapPoint can be used for general mapping and directions, it is not really meant for that. It is a business application first and foremost. It is best suited for sales type companies and positions. So for example, you buy a database of all hospitals in the USA and all of their statistics. You can then visually see all hospitals of a certain size or how much revenue if any you have sold there so far. You can then better decide sales territories and such. Of course, once you did, you can provide your sales force with MapPoint and have it provide them routes to each destination to maximize their time on the road and in front of clients.

With the introduction of the Ribbon menu system in most of the Office products, I would have thought they would have incorporated that into MapPoint by now, but they did not. There are still several products they have no done this with. I like consistency in software from the same vendor. Regardless, the toolbar is useable but still feels and looks rather old school.

It is fairly easy to import or link your demographic information as always. What is disappointing is that they still have not included the ability to link to data via ODBC or a SQL Client. For a business application, I would think you should be able to link to a read database and not just Access, Excel, or text files.

The best advice I can give you is this. Just like most Microsoft products, MapPoint is available for a 60-day trial. So always do that first to see if you like it before you buy it.