All major features of Streets & Trips application can be invoked by a shortcut key and even the power users don’t make the best use of the available shortcut keys in Streets & Trips. You can quickly accomplish routine tasks by using the keyboard shortcuts.

A keyboard shortcut is a key or set of keys that performs a predefined function. For example, in Windows, pressing ALT + ESC switches among loaded applications.

The following are the shortcut keys that I use most often.   I would consider these as the most useful and they'll help you to effectively and efficiently plan your trip.  If I missed your favorite let me know and I can added to the list.

For a list of all the available shortcut keys in the application, press F1 from Streets & Trips and read the help topic ‘keyboard Shortcuts’ under the Window Features section.

This CD makes a great companion for Street & Trips (any version).  It contains over 50,000 locations that are focused on the needs of today’s active RV’er.  It includes categories such as:

• private campgrounds
• public campgrounds
• military campgrounds
• rest areas
• truck stops
• shopping locations
• RV friendly restaurants
• casinos
• Elks Lodges that support RV parking
• mountain passes
• public golf courses

It is designed to work with Microsoft Streets & Trips releases from 2004 and later.

On the CD you’ll find Streets & Trips Template files (.stt) loaded with various POI, icons that can be used for custom pushpin symbols,  CSV files which can be imported in to show multiple categories on one map.

What impressed me the most was the huge amount of information for each location!  For example - campgrounds have the usual name, address and phone number but also Affiliation (Good Sam, etc), price, details on the campground sites (wifi, pull thru’s, big rigs, etc), quality rating, directions, contact email address, website, Web Map URL etc.   In fact the information overloads our information balloons and in order to view all the data you need to do the “click and drag down” selecting all the balloon contents.

Like with any other points of interest that you import into Streets & Trips they become available in the “find nearby places” searches along side the built-in POI.

Microsoft Streets & Trips comes with over 1.5 million points of interest so why do I need this?

• you are looking for more detailed information
• you additional categories that are of special interest to RVers
• your copy of S&T is several years old and could benefit from a fresh set of POI.

Learn more at: http://www.rvdirections.com

To find a lot-long in Streets & Trips you need to,

1. Pan and zoom the map to the desired location
2. Place the mouse cursor over the map area for which you need the lat-long
3. Then press Ctrl+Alt+C from the keyboard.

This will capture the lat/long of the cursor location into the clipboard, you can then past this into a notepad or a email client and share it with others. The copied text will look like this 47.59408°N 122.32092°W or the format can be changed from under Tools – Options (Settings Tab)

As with previous versions, you can search a point on Earth using latitude-longitude coordinates. Streets & Trips allows you to find a place by typing in the lat/long in the Find dialog

Lat/long helps you locate a place where there is no street address, this is especially  useful to find new communities, parks and other rural areas.

Aerial photography dramatically improves the usefulness of map data. Good aerial photos can provide details about communities, structures, vegetation and other features that will help in understanding an area. Especially when you are driving to a new city / town aerial imagery helps you to see how the streets and the neighborhood look like, you can imagine yourself driving thru the road and when you actually drive there the place will look quite familiar to you.

In this post we will see how to use Microsoft's aerial imagery and Bird’s Eye View to help us while planning trips using Streets & Trips.

1. Search for a city or any address from the FIND box
   

2. click Show in Live Search Maps    (note: older versions may have a different icon for this)

Live Search Maps will open in your default web browser and show you photo imagery of the same area.  This is great because it saves you from having to do another search and pan and zoom to the same location.  Streets & Trips does this all for you. 

If Birds Eye View image is available for that area then select Bird’s Eye from the top navigation bar, this will display the same map area in bird’s eye view.

Note:

1. You must have an Internet connection to use this feature.
2. Bird's eye view is available for many major metropolitan areas including US and Canada
3. This feature is available in Streets & Trips from version 2006 and newer.

If it passes, Maine would become the first state in the nation to ban RVs from commercial parking lots. Similar bills in Montana and Nevada were defeated after protests from RVers, according to a press release by the Escapees RV Club, a Texas-based club with 32,000 members nationally.

It would not just be WalMart's that would be affected.  If it passes it will apply to any publicly accessible parking lot. This will include casinos, truck stops, and even dirt or gravel boondock parking areas throughout the state.

View a PDF of the bill here.

What do you think? 
Would you stop RVing through Maine because of this?
Have you taken advantage of parking for free on commercial parking lots?
If so, how often to you end up going into the business (ie Walmart) to make a purchase during your stay?

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Someone recently asked me if Microsoft Streets & Trips showed seasonal road closures?  I thought I post the answer here.

YES IT DOES! :D

This comes as part of the free monthly construction updates that are downloaded from the web through the application.  If you plan a route you can quickly see if there are any seasonal road closures (in addition to construction projects) by review the  itinerary in the directions pane.  The road closures are clearly marked in a purple-ish color on the map.

Construction updates are currently available for the following products:

• MapPoint 2006, 2009, 2010
• Streets & Trips 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010

Download the construction update for May today!

All versions of Streets & Trips allow you to add pushpins to your map.  This a great way to personalize your trip with annotations that are meaningful to you.

There are a variety of built-in standard pushpin symbols but you can also create your own custom symbols and use them just as you would standard symbols.

Step 1: Creating a custom symbol

Note: sometimes you can find images on the web that will work but remember to respect copyright laws :D

MapPoint supports the following file formats for custom symbols:

• Uncompressed Windows bitmap (.bmp) file format with a maximum size limit of 128 × 128 pixels and color depth of 16 or 24 bits

• Windows icon (.ico) resource file format with a maximum size limit of 128 × 128 pixels and a color depth of 16 or 24 bits

• Windows cursor (.cur) file format with a maximum size limit of 128 × 128 pixels and a color depth of 16 or 24 bits

If needed you can use Microsoft Paint (built into the Windows Operation system) to convert your JPG, PNG, or GIF to a BMP format that will work in Streets & Trips just make sure that Save As…24-bit Bitmap as shown below.

Step 2: Importing your custom symbol

Click on the small down arrow next to the Red pushpin on the Standard Toolbar to display the pushpin chooser.

Click on “Import custom symbol…” and browse to your custom image and click OK.

Your custom symbol is imported into Streets & Trips and added to the list of available symbols. You can use a custom symbol the same way as any standard pushpin symbol.

Save this map file and your new custom symbol gets saved with the map.  That way if you share it out to a friend they can see your new custom symbol too!

As always, don’t forget to refer to the help files if you need more details on using custom symbols in your maps.

Please feel free to leave a comment if you have a question or a suggestion for future posts.

In our recent product demos we noticed that people were surprised to see that one can search for Points of Interest along the route apart from the usual search around a Point, and this blog entry demonstrates the ways of doing it.

You can use Streets & Trips to find more than 1.5 million businesses and attractions throughout North America, including hotels, restaurants, convention centers, gas stations, retail businesses, campgrounds, rest areas, and more. You can find information around a point, entire route, selected driving instruction, start point, end point or between route segments. These businesses and attractions appear on the map.
 

1. Create a route between 2 places

2. On the Tools menu, click Find nearby places.

   – or –

   On the Standard toolbar, click Find nearby places .

3. Click Categories.

4. In the Categories dialog box, click the Restaurants or the Places tab.
   
   

5. Select the check box next to each category of restaurant or place that you'd like to see on the map, and then click OK.

   Tip   To quickly select just a few categories, click Clear all, and then select the check box next to each category that you'd like to see on the map.

6. In the Search box at the bottom of the Find nearby places pane, select the radius in which you want to search.

7. Click Refresh to display a list of nearby places.

8. Click a place name in the results list to see its location on the map.

   
    
   

NOTE:

1. Streets & Trips has detailed information, such as the address and telephone number, for many points of interest. To display this information, right-click the point of interest, and then click Show information in the menu. Or expand the categories from the Find nearby places and double click the point of interest.

2. In the Around list, select what the search should be centered on. If you select Point, the search is centered on the point that you selected on the map. If you select Current location, the search is centered on your location as determined from your GPS device.

3. In the Sort list, select whether you'd like to see the results listed in alphabetical order by name or by distance (how far they are) from the selected point on the map

4. Whenever you make a change to the settings at the bottom of the Find nearby places pane or move the map, you will need to click Refresh in order to update the list of places.