Atlas shrugged - Rand McNally's StreetFinder 1996, DeLorme's Street Atlas USA 3.0 CD atlases - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Feb, 1996 by Dennis Eskow

If you do your own sales, marketing, and client contact and you don't own a CD atlas, this is a good time to change your ways. Rand McNally, the nation's oldest map maker, and DeLorme, famous for its street guides and city guides, have each turned out powerful atlas CDs with innovative or at least clever new capabilities. These applications will help you locate sites, give directions to those traveling to see you, find your way around new neighborhoods, and create powerful marketing tools for yourself or your clients. And at street prices of $50 for Rand McNally's StreetFinder and $79 for the Delorme Street Atlas, you probably can afford to own both.

Not that either package is perfect. StreetFinder is so graphically rich that it sometimes gets in its own way. It hogged the memory (16MB) of our Zeos Pentium Pantera for minutes at a time as it resolved maps at varying zoom distances. The results were great but the wait was often frustrating. The DeLorme product sets up more quickly than the Rand McNally atlas, but it also offers choices that turn out to be frustrating. The tutorial, for instance, is not that helpful; and once you click into it, you can't get out for a couple of minutes. It also has an embarrassment of details on some map plates that make certain maps of densely populated areas somewhat difficult to read.

These little problems aside, both atlas products are worth more than their street price. We gave an extra half star to Rand McNally for its innovative "walking guide" feature. Click on a walking icon and you get a wizard that asks you for starting and ending points. The cursor then changes shape and you are ready to take an imaginary walk from where you are to where you want to be. This translates into a brief report you can print out that provides accurate directions from one place to another. Consider how much aggravation that would save customers and suppliers who are trying to get over-the-phone directions. StreetFinder 1996 also has a data import feature that allowed us to pull names and addresses from a Microsoft Access database and connect them to locations on the map. You can import data from just about any database or spreadsheet and create outstanding market research based on any number of categories of information - from age to income and beyond.

Although the DeLorme Street Atlas didn't dazzle us with its technological innovation, we were pleased by its relative ease of use and its many features. We think of this product as the better marketing tool because of its link to a CD telephone directory. It was easy to use, and with more than 80 million business and residential listings, we were unable to locate only two out of the 30 we tried. Street Atlas provided utility line locations that were not in the StreetFinder, a nugget of information that can be useful to sales forces and marketing groups. If you use Street Atlas as part of your sales pitch you might give it to a customer who has e-mail and later use the Atlas software's mail enablement feature. Your customers or colleagues will receive the DeLorme map exactly as you sent it and will be able to incorporate it and manipulate it within their own systems. DeLorme also included support for Hypertext Markup Language links, meaning that if you have your own Web page, you can broadcast maps to potential customers over the Internet. That's an excellent use of technology.

The days of paper maps are now numbered as tools such as StreetFinder and Street Atlas give home-business managers yet another hat to wear: geomarketing expert.