Help with Microsoft Streets and Trips

[Jerry_75_Guy]

I recently purchased MS Streets and Trips '05 to faciliate planning my first SS1000, scheduled for a 1 or 2am start tomorrow.

 

First, I simply wanted to type in as a "waypoint", or click upon the interstates and Hwys I planned to use. Sometimes I could type in the info, other roads of the same type I had to pick a random point close to the change over, and click.

 

The next problem is more vexing and troublesome to the task at hand.

After finishing the route (my home in Fishers IN, Hwy 37, I-465, I-74, 274 around Cinn., I-75 to Knoxville, I-40, 24, 57, and 70 to 465 and home again) the distance showed as 1071. OK. I looked closer at the highlighted route and after zooming in, found several random excursions from the Hwys I choose, some of which weren't even connected to Any road?!

 

I deleted these deviations as best I could (for some reason, a couple of the small ones wouldn't go away, but didn't add more than 3 to 5 miles total, so I ignored them for now), and came up with a new mileage total of 1022, so I'm a bit worried that my route will be long enough to qualify.

 

On a seperate note, the program also appears not to have the flexibility to "invert" a route, or allow modification to the middle of a completed route file.

 

What am I missing?

 

Is a 22 mile "fudge factor" enough? I'd hate for this attempt to be disqualified.

 

Should I just go back and get the Delorme program?

[MattS]

The most likely cause of this problem is that when you are "snapping" your route points down, they are actually landing just off of the highways you are selecting, and the phantom routes that you're describing seeing (and then deleting) are the service road forays to these spots.

 

You'll need to zoom in and move these points to right on the highway's path ... or more conveniently (and accurate for your mission) the location(s) of gas stations you expect to visit to document the ride. Using the gas stations (rather than legs of the highway) is good for inverting the route -- as you can't easily invert a route that uses as a waypoint one carriageway of an interstate.

 

To invert a route in S&T, just re-arrange the order of the points in the route from 1,2,3 to 3,2,1.

[Bob Palin]

You can certainly modify a "completed" route file, just add the new stop point, sometimes it will figure it out and put in the right place and other times it will go on the end and you move it to the right place with the up arrow button. Is that what you meant? I find that S&T underestimates the distances but I wouldn't count on that for an SS1000.

[Jerry_75_Guy]

Yup, I suspected as much when I zoomed in and found the excursions, but was still suprised when I had trouble deleting some of them out.

 

There are 4million points of interest in the Delorme program, so using gas stops with it may work, but Streets & Trips only has something like 1.6 mil., and appears to only show some hotels and food joints; no gas.

[questrider]

Yes, to add points you need to right-click a highway and choose "Add as Stop" or "Add as End" and it places the points correctly. I've also found if you're not zoomed in totally when you click on a road it will pop up a window with choices of the roads you've chosen. Streets & Maps is a pretty good tool, but like a lot of Microsoft products, it's kind of clunky in the way that it works, especially when it comes to printing out maps (what a mess!). It should definitely have an "Invert Route" function, which it doesn't, and simply re-arranging numbers is not fun when you have 85 waypoints because to go the way you want to you have to constantly add points for the route to work right. And one of my biggest pet peeves with the program is not to have the ability to turn off all of those little yellow squares with numbers in them so you can see your route cleanly. Get a route with 40 points on it and then zoom out so you can see the entire route and all you see sometimes are little yellow boxes, one on top of another. Thoroughly annoying!!

[Bob Palin]

There are 4million points of interest in the Delorme program, so using gas stops with it may work, but Streets & Trips only has something like 1.6 mil., and appears to only show some hotels and food joints; no gas.

You have to go to the menu item View/Show or Hide Places then click on the Places tab in the dialog. It shows you all the types of places you can display, gas stations is one of them. However it does seem to have a limited number of them, it only shows 1 of the 3 in Loa,UT and none of them in Torrey. (2002 version)