Finding It Proves Easier on Some CD-ROM Maps Than on Others
Maps and telephone books are indispensable, right?
Well, sort of. The information may be vital, but it’s oftentimes more efficiently dealt with when stored on CD-ROM rather than large, folded sheets of paper or bulky books.
There are several street mapping programs for Windows-equipped PCs to choose from. Among four tested, one links seamlessly with a companion nationwide telephone directory program to search for phone numbers or addresses and then display or print detailed maps of their locations.
Two others could find and map many addresses in the 48 mainland states and Hawaii. The fourth can’t find addresses, but it can map the whereabouts of hospitals, K-12 schools, colleges and universities, prisons, government buildings and other landmarks.
Street Atlas USA, about $80 from Delorme, and its $80 companion program, Phone Search USA, helps you find businesses and residences in all 50 states and then produces the best maps among this quartet of programs. It is the only one of the four to integrate telephone searching with address mapping.
Compton’s Complete Street Guide, about $50 from Compton’s New Media, lacks the ability to find addresses, but it can locate 17 kinds of landmarks, including elementary schools and churches. I judged its maps second-best among the four, and the program offered the most flexibility in controlling how much area to map. In a current promotion, the package also contains Compton’s AAA Trip Planner highway mapping software.
Programs from two big names--Rand McNally and Microsoft--were disappointing. Both used the same geographic database from highly regarded Etak Inc., but that turned out to hobble their performance for this type of product.
Rand McNally’s StreetFinder, which sells for about $50, comes on two discs, meaning you have to change discs if want both Western and Eastern U.S. maps in the same mapping session. It has an excellent feature, however, that lets you easily create a series of map pages centered on the location of interest. A great use is to zoom in for a detailed map of the location and then zoom out and print the surrounding grid of maps to show how to get there.
StreetFinder can locate some hotels, motels and restaurants. It also has a reference section with toll-free telephone numbers for airlines, car rental firms and hotel and motel chains. The program also accepts imported address lists for searching, allowing it to be used in conjunction with your own customer database or telephone searching software.
Microsoft’s Automap Streets, about $70, also comes on two discs. Unlike the others, small regional map areas can be copied off the CD-ROM onto a hard disk, which means you could take the mapping software with you on the road on a laptop. But that same feature prevents you from seamlessly mapping any area you desire.
Automap’s product manager, John Krass, explained that Microsoft chose to leave the 266 map segments that Etak supplies unconnected rather than stitch them together as Rand McNally did. As a result, Automap lets you map from only one region at a time. Since Los Angeles County is one region and Orange County is another, you can’t map the area where the two counties meet. The computer screen or the paper print merely shows a gray blotch where the other region goes.
But if you were traveling to San Francisco or Washington, D.C., you could store those region files on a laptop and search for addresses on Automap once you arrived. With Street Atlas USA or StreetFinder, you have to do all of your address mapping before you leave. Then you can save image files of the resulting maps onto a laptop and take them with you, or print them out and leave the laptop at home.
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Street Atlas USA and Phone Search USA were a lot of fun to use. Street Atlas USA found more addresses than the other programs, from rural Maine to the heart of the San Fernando Valley. Phone Search USA found phone numbers and addresses for everyone I searched for whom I knew to have a listed number. It also found a lot of probable numbers and addresses for people I’ve lost track of over the years, though its address-locating routine was not perfect.
The detail that Street Atlas USA squeezes onto its single CD-ROM is amazing. You can map any area in all 50 states, down to about a mile square. Not only will you see the streets, hospitals, shopping malls, parks, rivers and lakes, you’ll also get elevation contour lines and land patterns, including the wetlands and sand bars in their proper positions near Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.
Street Atlas USA produced by far the most legible maps because all of its streets and highways are defined by a line along each side of the road. As you zoom in for greater detail, the streets get wider. In highly detailed maps, the street names are printed inside the street boundaries. In all cases, the names are large enough to read easily.
Compton’s Street Guide prints streets as lines, with easily read names. But you have no control over which streets it names or where names are placed. That depends on the level of magnification, or scale, being printed.
In contrast, the Etak-supplied database produces maps that hide streets that Delorme or Compton’s maps show at comparable scales. While that may make the Automap and Rand McNally maps appear less cluttered, it also makes them less useful.
Street Atlas USA is well worth its slightly higher price and by far the best choice among this group.
