Guided Tour: Zipcodes and other locations
The previous example used MileCharter to find distances between cities. MileCharter can find distances between any set of locations marked with pushpins. These locations can be cities, zipcodes / postcodes, street addresses, geographic coordinates, businesses, customers, etc. The only constraint is that they have to be within an area of the globe covered by Microsoft® MapPoint®'s road network.
Using MileCharter with Zipcodes
MileCharter is often used with zipcodes (or postcodes). Simply load a pushpin set with a pushpin for each zipcode that is required. This example map has a number of zipcode pushpins (blue dots) distributed across the contiguous US and Alaska. Some of the pushpins have their names exposed - illustrating that they are zipcodes.
In this example, each pushpin is located by zipcode and uses the same zipcode for the name. MileCharter uses the pushpin names to refer to the individual locations in the final table. The name does not have to be the same as the location, but it is convenient here because we are interested in the actual zipcodes. If you wished, you could use customer names or company names.
Here is the MileCharter panel, set as before. The pushpin set (zip_codes) is selected for both the start and end locations. We request a 'lower triangle' chart (without duplicates) of distances and travel times.
Here are the distance results. These are similar to before, but note that the spreadsheet is much larger.
MileCharter can take advantage of the large spreadsheets supported by Excel 2007 (and later). Earlier versions of Excel (2005 and earlier) are limited to 250 columns, although MileCharter has the option to span a table across multiple spreadsheets. Usually it is more convenient to upgrade Excel.
Next, we look at a business application: finding distances from multiple offices to a new customer.
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