Computing the Mileage Chart

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. An Excel window will be created, and mileages will be written to this as they are calculated.

MileCharter's status display shows the progress in the form of the number of routes processed, and the total number of routes required.

During processing, the Start button is replaced by the Cancel button. Press this to stop the processing. The Professional version will also display a Pause button during processing. Press this to temporarily pause processing. You can restart processing at any time - even after your computer has been restarted. This pause functionality is discussed in more detail on the Pausing MileCharter 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/MileCharter speed issues, and suggestions to improve processing time.