I need to be able to specify a different color for each pushpin. For example, include a "Color" column in my import file with colors like red, green, blue - and Streets & Trips would be able to recognize this and change the color of the pushpin for that address.

Alternatively, I could have a "symbol" column in my import file that contains the symbol filename. This would be better/more versatile, and perhaps easier for the S&T team to implement.

You can make your own Pushpins and color them anything you like. Use "Paint" from your Accessory Programs or something more sophisticated like Adobe's Create Suite.

Yes, I'm afraid you misunderstand the issue. Making a pushpin file is not a problem. Getting MS Streets and Trips to support a different pushpin file specified for each address in an import file is the problem.

Yes, however devgirl is suggesting a feature whereby users would be able to specify, at the time of import, the pushpin symbols associated with an address. I think I've read similar requests in the past.

Yes, I understood that; I was just suggesting an alternative solution that might help now.

That is not to diminish the validity of Devgirl's new feature request which would be cool.

devgirl,

Have you tried converting your file to GPX and importing it? The XML in GPX files supports "symbol" arguments. I don't know if Streets&Trips understands them or just ignores them. If you want to try it, I can supply a sample waypoint snippet from a GPX file with the appropriate arguments.

...ken...

Hi Ken,

I didn't try converting it to gpx, just looked at a few sample gpx files and did not see a symbol argument. Yes, if you have a sample snippet showing the symbol argument I'll give it a try.

Thanks!

Here's one that's kind of overkill to illustrate all the stuff you can put into a waypoint in GPX. Please pretend the dots are spaces. The forum editor truncates contiguous spaces to a single space and there's no way to override it that I can find. It's a pretty good bet that Streets&Trips will ignore the Garmin <extensions> section.

<wpt lat="50.5871390" lon="-127.3030240">
..<name>7 Hills Golf Course</name>
..<sym>Golf Course</sym>
..<extensions>
....<gpxx:WaypointExtension xmlns:gpxx="http://www.garmin.com/xmlschemas/GpxExtensions/v3">
......<gpxx:DisplayMode>SymbolAndName</gpxx:DisplayMode>
......<gpxx:Categories>
........<gpxx:Category>Golf</gpxx:Category>
......</gpxx:Categories>
......<gpxx:Address>
........<gpxx:City>Port Hardy</gpxx:City>
........<gpxx:State>BC</gpxx:State>
......</gpxx:Address>
....</gpxx:WaypointExtension>
..</extensions>
</wpt>

Here's just the parts that would interest you to play with (just the basics, no <extensions> required). You can put anything you want in the <cmt> or <desc> fields, including addresses and phone numbers. As I mentioned, I have no idea how much of this Streets&Trips will import. I know that there are programs out there to convert from CSV files (from e.g. Excel) to GPX and will create the fields above as well as those below.

<wpt lat="50.5871390" lon="-127.3030240">
..<name>7 Hills Golf Course</name>
..<sym>Golf Course</sym>
..<cmt>This is a comment.
It can be multi-line with line breaks in it.</cmt>
..<desc>This is a description.
It can also contain line breaks.
You can put pretty much anything in comment and description fields.</desc>
</wpt>

For your specific purposes, in the Garmin world the <sym>Golf Ball</sym> argument will tell the Garmin navigation device to use whatever symbol has been assigned the name of "Golf Course" when displaying this waypoint. In Mobile PC and Mapsource and on most of my Garmin units it's usually a golf ball on a tee but in one unit I think it's a green circle with a flagstick on it.

Other symbol names in Garmin-ese would be "Circle with X", "Pin, Red", "Lodging", "Restaurant", "Residence", etc. On most units the "Pin, Red" will be a red pushpin of the sort with the little round ball on the end rather than the default pushpin shape in Streets&Trips.

I don't know if any of this will be useful but I hope that you at least find it interesting. :)

...ken...

Thank you, this was very helpful in determining S&T's capability. It appears that Streets & Trips does not support either color or symbol change for each address imported, whether the file is in .txt, .csv, or the .gpx format (just the formats I tried).

Another thing I tried was manually changing the symbols for all my pushpins. Then exported the file to .gpx and reimported the file. The symbols were not retained. Next I tried manually adding the <sym> element to the export file and importing it, but S&T did not recognize it. So it appears that Streets & Trips 2010 does not fully support .gpx format.

Thanks for your help!

Thanks for the report, devgirl. We already knew that S&T doesn't fully support the GPX format but we're not yet sure of all the limitations. Your testing has added to the list. Hopefully Microsoft will develop GPX support further in future versions of S&T.

However, I don't think it would help in this case because I think the function you need to support the <sym> feature on waypoints does not exist in S&T at all. That is, as you have discovered, you can only select a pushpin symbol for a pushpin set, not for individual pushpins.

Until S&T has that ability, supporting the GPX <sym> argument (or any equivalent in CSV files) on individual waypoints isn't relevant because there's no way to use it within S&T.

It doesn't look like there's any way to force a switch to a new pushpin set within a single import file, either. It looks like all entries in a single import file will be forced into a single pushpin set. The possible alternative of importing multiple files with one entry per file kinda sucks.

...ken...