Hello,

New member here. I consider myself to be a moderately intelligent person but for some reason I'm having the hardest time understanding all of the information associated with the proper use of Garmin Mobile PC.

Here is my problem: I'm a real estate investor and I need to inspect about 20 to 30 properties per day. I work from home so my starting and ending point each day is my home address. I have the address data usually in some type of Microsoft format - Access database or Excel. I need to get these addresses into Garmin Mobile PC but at the same time I need to create the shortest route to save time and fuel.

There doesn't seem to be any easy way of getting address data in Microsoft format into Garmin Mobile PC. I have Garmin nRoute installed from a couple of years ago, Mapsource (I believe this came with nRoute, POI loader and anything else I can find to help me. Using BatchGeo, I can add the Lat/Lon coordinates to the address data, save as a CSV and push to Garmin Mobile PC using POI loader, but the route is "not optimized". I can't seem to figure out exactly what Mapsource can do for me, even after reading the user giude. Obviously, I'm completely missing something here. I can't be the first person to come up with the concept of an "optimized route". To be honest here, after spending many nights in the last few weeks reading Garmin user guides I'm probably more confused than when I started. Any help is appreciated.

Thank you, Terry

Just replying so I can get the answer to this as well. I've been using Microsoft Streets and Trips to do route optimization, but I do like the Garmin interface better.

If you have a route already set up, you can optimize it using the Sort button. One way to get there is Tools>Route Details>Edit.

Terry

Attached Images

Sort.jpg (156.5 KB)

I hope this is still relevant… Garmin will not optimize your route, but if you choose the order of your points, you can use Garmin to route between them:

To configure a specific route, use the option to select an intermediate, or mid-point.

Access the specific route configuration option (Tools>My Data>Routes>Manage My Routes or Tools>Where to>Routes>New).

Choose a start and end point for the route, and select Yes to choose intermediate points, and then you can select the type of route you'd like to compute between those points – fastest/shortest. Click Finish/Save and the Garmin will save the new specific route.

I use Garmin Mobile PC daily as well as the Route Optimization feature it has (10-15 stops at a time).