Once the start points, end points, and options are set; it is ready to start the charting process. Do this by pressing the Compute button. If the Excel option has been selected (and not hidden), an Excel window will be created, and mileages will be written to this as they are calculated.
During processing, MPMileCharter will display the Progress form:
This indicates the number of routes that will be calculated and progress in this calculation. Press the Stop button to halt processing.
The Professional license also adds the Pause button to the Progress form during processing (see above). Press this to pause processing. You can restart MapPoint, or even your computer between during a pause. The pause functionality is discussed in more detail on the Pausing MPMileCharter page.
Processing can take some time if you have a large number of locations. As a guide, a large test chart requiring over 60,000 route calculations took about 24 hours to process on a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 computer. There is some evidence to suggest that MapPoint's memory management results in slower processing over time. See the Notes for Speed section for a detailed discussion of MapPoint/MPMileCharter speed issues, and suggestions to improve processing time.
