Testing out the importing capabilities of MS Streets and Trips. I made a tab delimited file with several addresses in it and it imported okay.

However, I need to be able to specify a different color for each pushpin. Tried adding a color column with colors like red, green, blue - but Streets & Trips did not recognize. Is this possible in Streets and Trips?

Hi devgirl, and welcome to Laptop GPS World. This functionality is not present in the current 2010 version, but you are welcome to add it to our Wish List for Microsoft Streets and Trips.

Thank you for the reply. I will do that.

There is a workaround to handle this now. It is a bit more of a hassle, but if you are dealing with large amounts of data, it's WAY better than doing it manually.

Separate your input data onto separate worksheets, then import each worksheet individually. They will each land in their own pushpin set. If you choose the "Legend and Overview" view, you can right click on each pushpin set, which will allow you to change the symbol for all of the members of the set at once. It also allows you to name that set, which defaults to workbook name plus an integer to keep it unique.

Alternatively, you can separate them into completely different workbooks, and name each file the same name you want their pushpin set to be named.

I hope this helps.

Here is another work-around that might be easier.

Add a column to your data spreadsheet that contains the category into which each entry fits. If you want to use colors, then do so. Just put in the intials, G, Y, R, etc.

When you import using the data wizard be sure to identify the column containing those letters as "Name", and the real name as "Name2". All data rows will be imported together but, if you open the Properties for this new Pushpin Set, you will see that the Pushpins are sorted in order of what you put in the new data column. Now, you can select all Pushpins of each criterion (ctrl-shift-arrow-down, etc.), right-click and Cut, and then Paste these onto the map. That will have the effect of creating a new set with just these selected Pushpins. And the prior set will not contain these Pushpins. You can then go into Properties for that new set and set the Pushpin icon to whatever you want, color or otherwise. Repeat for all.

Unfortuanately, these letters will remain in the names of all the Pushpins; I cannot think of a way of eliminating them. I guess you cannot have everything.

Note that you can use any alpha-numeric character to differentiate these subsets, it does not have to be colors. When you have them broken out in their own sets, you can pick the icons as suits your fancy.

Thanks, guys for the suggestions- they are appreciated. Unfortunately I need to create an almost fully automated solution (user exports from our app, imports into S&T and views points); we are integrating a custom application with a mapping solution. It looks like S&T import does not support what we need so we are looking into other solutions like Google maps.