Question about software.....

If you are looking for something to just fill in the blanks you can try this http://www.cthreepo.com/poi/ .You may find Google My Maps or Excel a little faster.

I am not sure exactly what you are wanting to do with your list.

I think that you may be confused as to how the pois work with garmin. You poi list can be sorted any way you like. When you access it in your nuvi, it will only display the closest 50 locations. You can search for other locations by name. You can also sort your poi files by type. Make a folder for FOOD or STORES and then place multiple csv in them.

Does that clear it up any? You probably should make sure that your read the getting started section at the top.

Look at POI Verifier II, as it will sort any file by state. http://poiverifier.com/

Daniel

Edit: If you are wanting to create files, I would like to recommend GeePeeEx. It will allow cut and paste and input form an excel sheet into a form. I use it to make a gpx file and then poiconverter.js to make it into a csv. Works well for me.

http://geepeeex.googlepages.com/
http://sites.google.com/site/lschwabe/

Creating POI files and loading them to the SD card are very different things. Creating the lists can be done with many different tools. Once created they are loaded to the gps or SD card with POI loader. The loader program does a translation to a Garmin internal format. I don't believe that Garmin releases the spec for this internal format outside of the company. While you might be able to reverse engineer the poi.gpi file and figure out everything needed to duplicate this software, there seems to be no good reason to do so.

As to creating POI files, yea, a lot of current files are pretty lacking in some basic information, like the name of the State that the POI is in, and even when provided it may not be in a consistent format. Unfortunately when the subject of standards comes up some people do not respond favorably and some suggest the "standard" is to do whatever you want. Thus your post.

I'm not clear on what you are asking for. If you want a program that will return the State based on Lat and Long coordinates then I don't have one to offer you, although one should exist. If you want a clean way to create csv files based on some standard data, then I have a simple script that will create CSV files(and potentially gpx or other files). from a text file with field labels and data items. This is really just a different way to organize the data as opposed to directly creating a CSV file, the difference is that the data is indeed organized, and that a database, gpx file, or other format file could easily be created from it, something that isn't true of the csv file. If you want a copy of what I have so far, email me.

What I am trying to do is find a format that already exsists where I can drop in a street address or lat long and fill out the other information like what it is and maybe a category for it to go into and then use the poi loader/converter from garmin to load it on the SD card and have it saved in my GPS. For instance the PDGA website has lat long for all disc golf courses, I want to load the lat long and name the course and any other info and have it saved on the SD card on my GPS, also I would like to load the walmart and target info that has already been done on this website as well. Sorry for not making any sense or not being able to explain myself, I am not that tech savvy.
Adam

In your initial question, you mentioned "keep everything organized" twice. What exactly does that mean, to you? As others have suggested, you may need a basic understanding of how POIs work and perhaps give us a little more detail on what you are trying to accomplish so we can help you determine if it is even possible.

When I downloaded the walmart pois from this site they were in a list that was 10 billion lines long, I was wondering if there was a program like mapsource or anything else that had an outlook or itunes fell to it....were you could create food, sites, golf courses, friends addresses, as categories and then input the address or lat long store it in the proper or fitting category and then put it on a SD card and load it in the GPS and have it int he favorites....is that anymore clearer. It prob doesn't happen that way. As I said before I am new to all this know what I want to do, but can't seem to make it happen due to my non-tech savyiness. I just thought with the POI loader there may be some software to throw money at and make my life easier.....

You can load multiple POI files at once. The important thing to know here is that you either have to load them at the same time from the same rum of POI loader (otherwise the second load will overwrite the first) or use the poi.cgi renaming trick. You can find info on that renaming trick in other threads (it is what I do), but for now loading all POIs together should do what you want.

As to what is in the POI files, that gets us back to the lack of standards. There are some programs for editing current POI files, although none of the easy to use ones are free. And the POIs come in different formats (csv or gpx). csv is easy to work on with a text editor, but is the more unorganized form of the two, field 4 is just whatever anyone chose to throw into it. gpx is pretty well organized although still could be lacking data important to you, such as the State. gpx files can be edited with a text editor but because of the complexity should be edited with an xml editor. I'm sure that there will be suggestions made for one to buy.

I would suggest that you look for who is maintaining whatever POI that you find lacking in data and offer to clean it up and include the data that you feel should be there.

I sent you a email on developing categories.Let me know if that helps.Also have a breakdown using excel to make custom pois.I will send if you want to look at it.

I really appreciate all this.....With the links above and the e-mails sent I am off to try and tackle some of this....

So I need to create all the pois in one batch and then worry about updating them later correct? That's why I was wondering if there was software for this were you could create and upload as you saw fit and not overwrite predownloaded info......

People will gladly take your money for software. But that doesn't get past the problem that many files are poorly organized and that they follow no real standard. If the State names are not in the POI file then I know of no software that will automatically fill it in for you, although you could look at a map for each set of coordinates and fill in this data that was omitted when the file was first created.

I'm not clear what you were looking at for WalMart. I suspect that you 10 billion number isn't exactly precise. But it is important to not exaggerate like that when trying to ask for technical help; I can't tell if you were looking at a csv file or a much larger gpx file. Both are less than 10 billion lines. The CSV is more compact but lacks organization, the gpx is larger, more organized, may still lack some key data, but harder to work on.

When you upload one or more poi files to your gps (or your SD card), they all go into a file named by default poi.gpi. If you go into the memory through the "my computer" interface in windows and look in the poi folder you can see this file. If you rename it to something else but keep the .gpi extension, then it will not be overwritten the next time you load more POIs. The gps will still find it and use it.

Two things that are important to remember if you do this: 1) the sort order in the list of POIs will not be alphabetical, it will be split based on what is in each .gpi file, and 2) If you ever update any POI file you have to delete the file already on the gps with those POIs, and when you do that you'll want to upload any other POIs that were stored in the same file.

I am used to excel files that show what every category is. And when I got the walmart file it had no category headers and was an information dump, some of the locals started with the state and some didn't, it looked through my eyes as an information dump and was pages long......sorry for the 10 billion remark.
Adam

That sounds pretty typical of the csv files one often finds here. There is a thread discussing some POI standards here:
http://www.poi-factory.com/node/18592
that you might want to read through and join in. You'll see there seems to be a lack of consensus on how to proceed, but if we don't get some organization to what effort people are putting in then things are not going to improve and files will continue to be like the one you write about.

Again, if you want to see what I'm doing, hit me with an e-mail (I can't send e-mail atachments to you from here, need an actual e-mail address).

My thought is that you still will want a different csv file for each company. If you do the reading you will see what each column in the csv means.

I bought both pieces of software - what I recommended above for $25. Well worth the investment - especially if you aren't technically inclined. It will save you many hours of frustration trying to figure out why your files aren't working because of improper formatting.

been there, done that w/o getting the t-shirt

Daniel

1.) On of the files you mentioned has been updated in the last few days to include specific names for each location instead of the same name on each line.
2.) You don't want stores, friends, and campgrounds in the same file -- each of these would be a separate POI file and all POI files can be loaded at the same time using POI Loader. At this point on your learning curve it is much easier if you just reload all you files each time you add or change one.
3.) The "SD" in SD card stands for "Secure Digital". SanDisk is a brand of memory cards.
4.) The simplest way to organize your loading of POIs is explained by Motorcycle Moma:
Folders/files on your computer --

> My POI (Main folder)
>> IHOP (subfolder)
... IHOP.csv
... IHOP.bmp
>> National Parks (subfolder)
... National Parks.gpx
... National Monuments.gpx
... National Recreation areas.gpx
... National Parks.bmp
... National Monuments.bmp
etc.

In this example, IHOP and National Parks show up as categories and then under National Parks, the subcategories of National Parks, National Monuments, and National Recreation Areas show up.

Here are some screenshots of what it would look like.

This is a shot of the folder and files on my computer.
http://i18.tinypic.com/4q8bl8m.jpg

This is how the first level shows up on my Zumo.
http://i9.tinypic.com/4t6c8ye.jpg

When I select the National Parks category, this is what I get.
http://i2.tinypic.com/62qyi4z.jpg

Then if I select National Monuments, I get this.
http://i8.tinypic.com/4kbd8jc.jpg

5.)As recommended above, GeePeeEx Editor will make your life much easier in the creation of POI files (one at a time).