Microsoft Streets and Trips and RVTrek Operations

Microsoft Streets and Trips is a powerful street mapping a routing package offered by Microsoft. We won't try to teach all the basics about how to use Streets and Trips here, but rather just show the important points and how it may be used with RVTrek to the trucker's advantage. Microsoft Streets and Trips's features include:

• Display of maps of the continental United States down to the street level in all locations. The rest of the world is covered as well, though in less detail. There are a number of different map presentation formats, such as road map, political map (I prefer this one personally), and in 2006 a night vision map which doesn't blind a night traveller. Detail is automatically pruned with zooming in, and the map font size can be adjusted for those of us with less than perfect eyesight.
• The ability to locate addresses on the map, technically known as geocoding. This is not a fool-proof feature; some addresses depend on special ways of expressing addresses while equally valid ways are missed, and new and changed streets are a perennial problem. To combat this problem Microsoft releases a new edition of Streets and Trips about yearly. This is not to say that a RVTrek user must upgrade yearly; 99% of information is the same from one year to the next, but it is surprising how that 1% can bite hard when it is encountered.
• The ability to determine a routing from one location on the map to another. Routing is the biggest feature of Streets and Trips and the one most useful to truckers. Experienced truckers usually know how to get from one city to another, but there are thousands of possible addresses in each city, and unless the trucker is on a milk run, he will need help more often than not at the local level. Streets and Trips provides this, with lots of rich options, such as controlling how to mix interstate travel with secondary roads, anticipated travel times, mileage and costs and so on. The routing is controlled by assigning Start status to a location, End status to another, and Stop status to ones in between in order. Routings may be saved to the disk drive and later restored, of course.
• Streets and Trips is delivered with a large set of pre-located icons, for common traveller uses - hotels, restaurants, points of interest. These can be turned on and off in functional groups. Each icon contains Info data, extra information that can be made be shown in a "bubble" or hidden as desired.
• Streets and Trips supports user "pushpins", which are locations on the map. Pushpins have icons selected from both supplied and custom sets, extra information (for display in the Info bubble), and may act as start, end or stop locations for routes. This is the feature of Streets and Trips that RVTrek takes advantage of, supplying a large number of pushpins with custom icons for all the different resources that a trucker needs and can use. Pushpin sets can be loaded onto a map and then become part of the map's route information, and saved in that way. There are lots of options about pushpins which we will describe below.

RVTrek is delivered in two files, RVTrek.est and RVTrek.chm and a folder of .html files, along with some other, less essential files such as a copy of the user license, zipped together into a single installer file. Following the recommended default installation procedure, the .est file will be installed in the user's My Documents folder, and the .html files installed in c:\trek, with the rest of the files in a folder named My Documents\RVTrek\. The .chm file is the help file (the one you are currently reading), which can be opened by double-clicking the .chm file icon, or through Start->Programs->TruckTrek->Help. The RVTrek.est is the meat of RVTrek, the pushpin collection and custom icons. These can be loaded by using the File->Open command from Streets and Trips, and locating and opening the file RVTrek.est. Since Streets and Trips opens automatically on My Documents, RVTrek should be immediately available from the first open dialog window. At this point, if you are using a version of Microsoft Streets and Trips that is later than the 2004 edition, Streets and Trips will want to upgrade the pushpin data to the latest revision; see here for more information on that. Once the RVTrek pushpins are loaded, they are included in any routing file created thereafter in this Streets and Trips session. That means that when a routing is saved, all the RVTrek icons are saved with it. They are a permanent part of that routing map. This has its good and bad points: the pushpins do not have to be reloaded whenever Microsoft Streets and Trips is started up, and routes determined using particular pushpins are always valid. On the other hand, changes made to the pushpins (like adding a user advisory) cannot be filtered back to the original set of RVTrek's pushpins, and any such changes will not appear in earlier saved maps, only in those produced after the change. Such changes have to be handled in a special way, which we'll describe below.

The html files, one for every object in RVTrek, are placed in a fixed, known folder that cannot be changed; it is c:\trek. This folder may require up to 13 MB of disk space, which is not much by today's standards, but because it must be located in the root C: partition, it merits special mention. The necessity that it be there is a bug (or perhaps oversight) built into Microsoft Streets and Trips.

Operations

TKE proposes this way to use RVTrek. It is not the only way to use RVTrek, but it works to allow user updates to be carried on into the future, and to allow for TKE update operations as well.

After installing RVTrek into the My Documents folder on the hard drive, make a copy of that .est file and name it "RVTrek-Work.est". That will be your copy of the RVTrek pushpin data that you may make changes to. RVTrek-Work.est should be changed to a read-and-write file by right-clicking on the RVTrek-Work.est icon, choosing "Properties", and then clicking on the Read-Only checkbox to remove the check mark, so that it can be edited as needed.

When a route is to be created, copy RVTrek-Work.est to another file (I use a serial numbering scheme, starting with 100.est and incrementing with each new trip ). Once you've copied it, double-click on that file to open Streets and Trips, and all the RVTrek resources will be present. Do your routing on that map, and save it as you normally would any document through it's useful lifetime (File->Save). I keep old routings, and eventually copy them into a backup store; they could prove valuable in the future.

If you should come across anything that needs to be edited and permanently saved, like a truck stop that may be useful but is not already in RVTrek, create a pushpin for it in your current trip map first. There is an icon in Streets and Trips at the lower left to create a pushpin; click on the arrow just to the right of the icon to select an appropriate graphic (see illustration below). Open up another copy of Streets and Trips by double-clicking on RVTrek-Work.est. Right-click on the pushpin you just created, click "Copy", then switch to the Streets and Trips containing RVTrek-Work.est and right-click on the background and select "Paste". The pushpin should be copied into your working copy in exactly the same location it was at in the original map. Save and exit the RVTrek-Work.est copy of Streets and Trips. That pushpin will now be a permanent part of maps created by these methods thereafter.

Every so often the *.est files created with these procedures should be backed up to a permanent media, just as all user data files should be. Once that is done it is safe to purge My Documents of any or all the numbered maps, as they should be available from the backup copy.

When an update becomes available for RVTrek from TKE, that will update RVTrek.est and RVTrek.chm. Before applying the upgrade, backup My Documents so you can always return to that point. Rename the file RVTrek-Work.est to something like RVTrek-Work-old.est. After installing the new RVTrek files and creating a new RVTrek-Work.est, any updates made to the old working file can then be copy/pasted into the new one. Use caution while doing these exercises to make sure the results at each step are as expected, to avoid accidentally deleting a file, and perhaps loosing your updates.

A Microsoft Streets and Trips Gotcha

Be careful looking up addresses in Streets and Trips. When an address is entered into the Find window, it attempts to match that address with its database of addresses. If it doesn't find an exact match, it will try for the street with no number, then for just the city, and finally just the state without the address. It will list the possibilities in the Find window. If it cannot find the street, it may often land on that street name in another city in the same state, perhaps hundreds of miles away. Always check its choice as displayed in the pushpin bubble against the address you gave it.

Pushpin Options

The pushpins and groups of pushpins imported into your maps by RVTrek can manipulated in many ways.

Each individual pushpin has a number of options, which are accessed by right-clicking on the pushpin to display its "context menu". Options there include Show/Hide the Info bubble, showing just the first line of the bubble (the "name"), highlighting the pushpin with a yellow dot, zooming in on the pushpin, setting the pushpin to be the start, end or a stop on the current route, setting the direction that the bubble is displayed relative to the pin, and displaying a properties menu (depicted on the left, showing only the first page of the changeable properties).

The properties menu allows for changing the icon displayed for this pushpin, and selecting the pushpin set it is to be a member of. The sets supplied with RVTrek are shown on the left.

After the RVTrek pushpins are placed in a working map, the groups that they are organized into, marked with their custom icons, are displayed in the "Legends and Overview" pane, usually displayed down the left edge of the user's screen. This is the list of pushpin sets shown on the right. Right-clicking on a set name yields another context menu for adjusting set features, including cutting, copying, pasting and deleting the set, zooming in to include all the members of the set on the map display, exporting the set to an Excel spreadsheet, and, again, changing the set properties. These set properties include the set name, the set icon, and way hyperlinks are handled, the data displayed in the Info bubble and whether headings are included in the bubble. If you want to change some of these properties in all your maps following (as opposed to just this map), then the changes have to be made to your working.est and saved to it.

Notice here that it possible to delete whole sets of pushpins from the map (or all maps, if RVTrek-Work.est is so edited). This allows you to permanently remove a set if it is not useful to you. It would be nice if Streets and Trips allowed a group to be simply hidden, but it does not. This is why it is always a good idea to keep a copy of RVTrek.est or RVTrek-Work.est around, so that if a set was deleted, it is not permanently gone.

RVTrek and the contents of this help file are
Copyright©2006 by ThistleKeep Engineering; all rights are reserved.
Comments and suggestions, as well as support, are entertained at Lmc@ThistleKeep.com.
"Punch!" and other titles of Punch! operations are trademarks of Punch! Software L.L.C.
"Streets and Trips" is a trademark of Microsoft Inc.