I love maps. Even more than looking at maps I enjoy creating maps. Before the
personal computer revolution, making maps was something that would have been
difficult for one amateur sitting at a desk to do quickly. Today, software makes
it easy and cheap to churn out tons of maps. The mapping program I used regularly
is Microsoft’s MapPoint.
MapPoint 2000 was a steal at about $100 or so retail. Unfortunately, the geniuses
at Microsoft decided to add a mapping feature so business folks can know how
to get from point A to point B, and raised the cost of MapPoint 2001 to $250
retail. That bites, but if you can find a copy of MapPoint 2000 on a shelf somewhere,
grab it (the geographic data should be accurate enough for most purposes for
at least another couple years).
MapPoint comes with assorted demographic data, but I prefer to import data
from other sources. The software makes this relatively easy. Typically I create
a spreadsheet in Excel that has the name of each country of the world in one
column and some statistic such as the per capita gross domestic product. MapPoint
imports the spreadsheet, assigning the GDP rates to the correct countries, and
then produces a color-coded map. It gives a variety of ways to show the distribution
of whatever it is I want to measure.
It can save maps as HTML pages. The maps look fine as GIF files, but like most
Microsoft products the HTML it produces is crap, so you’ll need to import this
into another program such as Macromedia Dreamweaver to tweak it to your liking.
For an example of how the HTML pages look (after massaging them with Dreamweaver),
check out my map
of GDP in Africa.
The only real drawback is that there is no easy way to get a map of the entire
world since the interface uses a model whereby you can only see half of the
world at the time — you can rotate which part of the world you can see both
along latitude and longitude but you can never see or export a map of all countries
of the world. To get this sort of map you’d have to export one-half of the world
as GIF file and then the other and then manually stitch them together in a program
like Paint Shop Pro (i.e., probably more trouble than it’s worth).
Other than that limitation, MapPoint is an excellent product if you can find
the older 2000 version or can afford the $250 entry price for the latest model.
If you need to create a lot of maps illustrating world demographic data, like
I do, it is a lifesaver.