Pushpin Symbols for Microsoft® MapPoint® 2009
Microsoft MapPoint 2004 and 2006 both shipped with 336 pre-defined custom symbols. These incorporated all the pushpins from MapPoint 2002. Microsoft chose to replace these symbols with a new set of 46 pushpins for MapPoint 2009.
Unfortunately the MapPoint 2009 documentation was not updated to reflect these new pushpins. The new pushpins are as follows:
MapPoint 2009 will load files from earlier versions of MapPoint, and automatically replace the old pushpins with new ones. Note however, that a program or add-in must still respect the pushpin indexes. Ie. if you wrote a program that was hard-coded to use "symbol 100", this will now fail with an exception unless you have loaded at least 55 custom symbols.
Adding MapPoint 2006's Pushpins to MapPoint 2009
With the release of MapPoint 2010, the recommend approach is to purchase MapPoint 2010. The following paragraphs have been retained for those who are reluctant to upgrade at the present time:
MapPoint 2009 retains the ability to load custom pushpins. Therefore it is possible to load the pushpins from MapPoint 2006 as custom pushpins. This allows you to use the earlier pushpins, although the index numbers will be different.
Microsoft have produced templates for MapPoint 2009 and Streets & Trips 2009 that include the pushpins for MapPoint 2006. These are available for download from Laptop GPS World.
Alternatively, you could manually import some or all of the images. The previous MapPoint 2002 pushpin images are also available for download from the Microsoft website, here. This download page says they are the 2006 images, but they are not! MapPoint 2004 introduced new pushpins, and this download does not include them. These pushpins are stored as BMP files - the same as that used by MapPoint. These can be manually imported into a MapPoint 2009 map or template.
Once you have a directory of the required pushpin images as BMP files, you will need to load them in MapPoint. This quickly becomes tedious, so I recommend you use John Meyer's Load Custom Symbol Tool instead. Install this tool. Start MapPoint 2009. Then start the tool, select the required custom symbols, and they will be loaded into MapPoint's current map.
If you have any questions about these instructions, you should post them to MapForums or the microsoft.public.mappoint newsgroup.
Further Pushpin and MapPoint Information
If you need a utility to manage all of your location pushpins, try a free trial of the Pushpin Tool.
Are you interested in using Microsoft MapPoint to solve similar problems for your organization? If so, contact us and we can get Microsoft MapPoint working efficiently to solve your business problems.
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