Maptitude: It's a deal

Maptitude is a great deal for all but the most sophisticated of mappers and it costs a fraction of other similar programs. One drawback: There is no Macintosh version.

For the United States, you get: county and state boundaries, Census designated places and metropolitan statistical areas boundaries, cities and populated places boundaries, roads and highways, local streets, landmarks, railroads, water, ZIP codes, Census tracts, Census block groups, designated market areas, areas of dominant influence and TIFF images of a few dozen major U.S. metropolitan areas. You also get world boundaries, places, highways, railroads and latitude and longitude grids.

You get selected Census data, including the basics of population, gender, race, marital status, age, ancestry, occupation, household income, poverty status, and more. In some instances, as when you join an outside database to your map, Maptitude will do some math for you, giving you raw numbers as well as highs, lows and averages. So, for example, if you had a FoxPro database on accidents in your area, you could join that to a Maptitude ZIP code map, and it would figure out the average number of accidents per ZIP code.

You get what you pay for. First, the entire program is designed for a screen operating at a 1024x768 resolution. If you are like me and operate at 640x480, you cannot see or use half or more of the toolbar, which means going in and out of menus more often than you might like. This resolution means that even with a 17-inch monitor, I often cannot see my whole map at once unless I make it very small and, consequently, lose labels and other details.

Second, map and label quality is poorer than that of Atlas GIS or MapInfo. Lines are fuzzier and so forth. These maps probably shouldn't be reproduced in the paper without some enhancement in a graphics program.

Maptitude offers a nice range of thematic mapping options, but nothing extravagant. You can choose from colors and patterns, pin mapping, scaled symbol, dot density, pies, horizontal and vertical bars and stacked bars. You can modify and hide legends, as well as colors, patterns, dot shapes, etc.

As you build maps, you can save each layer as an editable or non-editable map. However, you have ZIP codes that extend beyond your city boundary, for example, you cannot tell Maptitude to split the ZIP area using the city boundary as its guideline. You must manually edit the ZIP code boundary, dragging its polygon lines down to match the city boundary. Or, you can trace the city line with the drawing tools and then delete the area outside of it. This can be extremely tedious.

When you delete a portion of a geographic area, Maptitude estimates what percentage of the data is deleted and updates the remaining data accordingly. So, if you delete 60 percent of a ZIP code area because it is outside your city, then 60 percent of the population will be deleted in the attached Census data for that map. Of course, this isn't the greatest way to split data, because it assumes the population is evenly distributed in the ZIP code. It works the other way too. If you join three counties together in a map, it will add their three populations.

One annoying thing is that when you edit a map (for example, you select your city from the United States for mapping), the data does not automatically go with the map lines. Several times I created maps, forgetting to check that little box, and all I created were empty shells with no attached data tables. And you can't undo it. You have to start all over again.

Another problem: Thematic mapping rounds off numbers by default. You can check a box to turn this default off and you should in many cases. Rounding often messes up thematic mapping when you are plotting numbers in equal intervals because not all of the numbers will fall at equal intervals, making your map inaccurate. Turning off the rounding function fixes this.

This is an area where I am not very impressed. You can use an automatic labeling tool or a manual labeling process. With either choice, label layers cannot be treated differently when it comes to overlapping or not overlapping them. Therefore, if you have a map with ZIP code boundaries and then streets over that, and you want to overlap ZIP code labels but not street labels, you can't do it. They all must be overlapped or not overlapped. Automatic labels also cannot be moved around, so if they overlap, you can't pull them away from each other. Manual labels can be moved around, but manual labeling can be tedious and time consuming.

You can save maps in Maptitude as editable or non-editable. Editable versions can be copied from your PC and pasted into something like Paint Shop Pro (which you can download from the Internet as shareware and pay $69) and then saved in a variety of formats, including Adobe Photoshop and MacPaint. These can be opened up by graphics programs on Macs and sharpened, edited and published. If you have a network, you can move the files. If you don't have a network, your maps will have to be small enough to fit on a disk.

Documentation is in a single book that could be more detailed, but is decent. Technical service is knowledgeable, honest about the program's inadequacies, polite and helpful. Technicians are often all busy, but the company takes messages and gets them to the techs call back within a couple of hours. The customer service rep was courteous, knowledgeable and took the hint when I told him I wasn't interested in a hard sell. Additionally, the company gave us a 30-day unconditional money-back guarantee so I could put the program through the paces and decide whether it fit our needs.

Carol Napolitano can be reached at (402) 444-1000, ext. 2403, or send e-mail to CarolNap@aol.com