We are researching Mapping Software and are having trouble identifying a program that has the functions we need. Has anyone used a mapping program they would recommend?

Things we want it to be able to do.

1. Allow Upload of Excel Spreadsheet with locations of plants, competitors and other locations
2. Be able to color code pins by company and possibly change shape of pin for different categories for same company (ie, plant, retail location, distribution, etc0
3. Map at least 300 locations from one excel spreadsheet.
4. If it has additional tools to help run reports, etc, would be nice.

Not sure if it can do it, but MapAnything is a leader I know of.

Have you checked if Google fusion tables might work for you?

Also, with some pretty basic JavaScript you can do the plotting you are looking for with the Google Maps API. What kind of reports would you need?

Are there shape files? Is the mapping software drawing stuff from scratch?

Or does the excel spreadsheet put some pins on existing map?

I use Batchgeo.com

Your use may be more intensive than mine

Pretty sure I've done stuff that basic with just googled maps and fusion tables. But that was a few years ago and Google likes to randomly remove functionality.

Were you only looking for free software? Because MapAnything and Mapline are both available on the quick google search and weren't difficult to find and well reviewed.

Or just get a standard advanced visualization software like Tableau and do it easily plus a million other things.

Willing to pay. Already demoed those two and they are not that good. Looking for something better.

I could put something together for you that does 1-3 pretty easily. Drag a file in to web browser page, have it parse and plot on to Google maps with different color codes / icons per whatever rules you want. #4 is the wild card.

What were the drawbacks on the demos you tried?

Did not print well images very low quality. Blurry. Also many small cities are not in there city database so it does not plot those and does not tell you it is not plotting those cities. Found them on our own.

if you can convert everything to lat long than "r shiny" can do what you want. It will take someone to sit down for a bit and figure out the coding to match your requirements, but it will do the job.

Q-GIS

You can already do 1-3 with google maps

tunefx - did not see the Q-GIS post til this morning, might have been interesting to test it, but it appears weare gong to go with

Tableau Software.

Need to get moving on project and going to start with Tableau and then see where we go from there.

We have Tableau and ArcGIS at my company and do very similar things to what your trying to accomplish. Tableau is great visually, but really better for charts and graphs. I have found the mapping can be a but difficult. ArcGIS is great for mapping as it is much more customize-able, but it can be more difficult to use.

Maybe we will take a look at ArcGIS after we get going. Appreciate that you came here sharing the info.

If you're still looking, we could write an import for your data in whatever format you prefer to get it into google maps using the google maps API. As one guy up there said, google maps can handle most of your requirements, and you won't have to worry about the cities database.

You can email me at info@advektechnology.com if you are interested.

Problem with Google Maps is how it prints. We can get the data in there, but it continually defaults back to a zoomed out look and we were wanting some fo the maps to print closer. Maybe we are doing something wrong, but the final product was not exactly what we were looking for.

ArcMap

I've used Maptive before, and it's okay. Allows you to create maps at no charge with upload from Excel or dumping info from Excel to their template.

Has anyone tried Map Right in Dallas?

Free 7 day trial and local support. might be a quick and dirty way to test for your application mooseherd

I will check them out.

For this project we had to have things done by Thursday, so I already pulled the trigger on Tableau and we are exporting their maps into Illustrator to clean them up. But I do appreciate the suggestions and ideas.

It was amazing to me when we decided to up our game in this area and originally started doing our research into different programs that we found so many of them to be flawed or pro-print quality. When we are putting together $100 million dollar acquisition plans, having a poor quality map does not look good to the board. Does it really matter in the long run? Probably not, but we have some very picky board members and having good clean visuals is important to me.

I might try some of the new suggestions that people have put out for future projects, but I definitely thing some of these software programs need to improve their marketing and make them easier to find for people like me.

Thank you to everyone and please continue adding to the page as I am going to continue following it if other add info.

Good luck, mooseherd - if you have time, post some feedback on Tableau

I took a hard look at Tableau last year, but they've changed their pricing recently and looks more attractive. But ultimately it didn't work for me for street level mapping/geocoding.

I know a few RE types/RE developers using Buxton, with good results, but, way too pricey for my needs.

Top for Mapping:
1) ArcGIS ArcMap - Precise mapping
2) Tibco Spotfire - Industry standard for mapping/visualization in oil and gas and very capable. This is what you want.
3) Tableau (Not as good geographically as Spotfire)
4) Power BI - Free from Microsoft, but not as geographically capable. They have been working on it so it may be better now