It's a small world after all

Home Office Computing, Jan, 1998 by Carol S. Holzberg

With a database or contact manager, you may have all of your client's names and addresses at your fingertips, but could you find them on a map? With BusinessMap Pro, the days of paper maps and pushpins are over.

For this review, we imported our database with client names, addresses, and more into BusinessMap Pro's professionally drawn map templates. Not only did BusinessMap Pro geographically code the data by city, county, state, country, and world regions, but it also displayed area codes, zip codes, major roads, and federal lands.

BusinessMap Pro ships on two CD-ROMs. The first disk contains both the application and map components; the second disk features Geographic Data Technology's street-based Dynamap 1000 Street Network with information on millions of U.S. streets.

BusinessMap Pro is a true time-saver, supporting such programs as Excel, Lotus 1-2-3, Act!, GoldMine, Organizer, and others. After importing a database, we couldn't add new records, edit existing data, or sort database information. We docked half a star due to these apparent one-way imports.

The program's Find by Fields command located records in our client database and displayed them on a map, complete with text labels. For example, while we searched for a particular company named Micro Research, BusinessMap Pro gave us the map location.

Although some users may find the program tricky to use, it's well worth the effort for anyone who needs to see the big picture.