Review by Gavin Scott

I was expecting to like MapPoint a lot more than I did. I guess I was hoping for a well designed Microsoft user interface experience, but MapPoint just feels gimicky and poorly designed. Too may ugly icons and very little feel of quality to the application.

I encountered several cases of weird behavior, though overall the program performed as advertised.

If you don’t need the business data features of the program then there’s definitely no reason to buy this over the much cheaper Microsoft Streets and Trips.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the DeLorme user interface either, but for the price I just expected more from Microsoft.

I believe MapPoint is a superset of Streets and Trips, so if you have MapPoint then you should be able to do everything with it that you can with Streets and Trips such as trip planning / routing, GPS based guidance, etc.

If you need some basic GIS software to present business data as map overlays, then this is one of the only inexpensive solutions that I know of, and for that it can be worthwhile. Just be prepared for it to not feel up to the quality of other Microsoft applications.