POI Creation Tool?

 

I need to create a POI file with sites of a particular company in the United States by doing a search on the internet and somehow use a tool to save or convert the search results onto a POI file. Is this possible? Thank you,

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Nuvi 750 TomTom VIA 1605

Patience

All it takes is patience.

Get the addresses and convert them to the longitude and latitude data using any of the batch geocode tools. I can't find the online batch tool I've used many years ago, but here's a discussion link.

http://www.poi-factory.com/node/8555

You can then save it as a comma delimited file (*.CSV), and manipulate it using a MS Excel (or equivalent) to match the format used by Garmin or any other GPS system of your choice.

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nüvi 750 & 760

several possibilities

rdrivas wrote:

I need to create a POI file with sites of a particular company in the United States by doing a search on the internet and somehow use a tool to save or convert the search results onto a POI file. Is this possible? Thank you,

There are several possibilities. The easiest of course is the comma delimited file. The formats differ between Gamin and Tom-Tom slightly but essentially are the same. The CSV file is a simple text file with the data in specified positions. The first two positions are for the coordinates with the third position containing a name for the entry. The fourth column is what Garmin calls description and can contain most any text.

Strip the data you need from the company website, massage it a little in Excel or another spreadsheet program and then geocode the addresses. Do a search on this site and you will find many, many entries telling you haw to obtain the coordinates.

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Illiterate? Write for free help.

Try this

rdrivas wrote:

I need to create a POI file with sites of a particular company in the United States by doing a search on the internet and somehow use a tool to save or convert the search results onto a POI file. Is this possible? Thank you,

A fairly good batch geocoding tool can be found at
http://www.mapdevelopers.com/batch_geocode_tool.php

It will allow you to input up to 100 addresses at a time (although I have not tested this limit).

It does not specify what the input must be like but I will give an example of what does work.

I had used the www.joann.com "Store Locator" facility to acquire all of the store addresses. I used several tools to get the addresses into the general format of
Name
Street Address
City
State abbreviation
Zipcode

I copied and pasted the following into mapdeveloper's "Input Window".

Quote:

Jo-Ann 0102,6320 Seven Corners Ctr,Falls Church, VA, 22044-2409
Jo-Ann 0106,2A Bureau Dr,Gaithersburg, MD, 20878-1402
Jo-Ann 0112,245 Tamal Vista Blvd,Corte Madera, CA, 94925-1110
Jo-Ann 0115,46301 Potomac Run Plz,Sterling, VA, 20164-6619

When I clicked the "Find Addresses" button below the "Input Window", mapdevelopers.com returned

Quote:

Jo-Ann 0102,6320 Seven Corners Ctr,Falls Church, VA, 22044-2409 38.860739 -77.157144
Jo-Ann 0106,2A Bureau Dr,Gaithersburg, MD, 20878-1402
39.143001 -77.21892
Jo-Ann 0112,245 Tamal Vista Blvd,Corte Madera, CA, 94925-1110 37.937876 -122.518268
Jo-Ann 0115,46301 Potomac Run Plz,Sterling, VA, 20164-6619 39.025292 -77.396839

I copied and pasted the output file into Notepad and saved it as "mapdevelopers.txt" (although any name.txt would do).

Then, I fired up Excel and clicked "File" > "Open". I went to the bottom of the "Open" dialog and changed the "Files of type:" box so that it read "Text files (*.prn, *.txt, *.csv)". Then I navigated to the folder where I had saved "mapdevelopers.txt"; highlighted "mapdevelopers.txt"; and clicked "Open".

Excel gave me the "Text Import Wizard" dialog. I changed the "Choose the file type that best describes your data" to "Delimited" and clicked "Next". I checked "Tab" and "Comma" as the delimiters and clicked "Finish".

I did a "File" > "Save As" and went to the bottom of the dialog and changed the "Save as type:" box to read "CSV (Comma Delimited) (*.csv)" and saved the file as "mapdevelopers.csv".

I now had a file that was now close to what I wanted - but obviously not in the format that POI Loader would accept.

So, I fired up EPE (Extra POI Editor) which can be downloaded from
http://turboccc.wikispaces.com/Extra_POI_Editor#toc5

I did "Options" > "M Column CSV fields" and chose one of the "profiles". I typed "mapdevelopers" in the "Change selected profile name" box and clicked the "OK" button that appeared at the end of the field when I started typing. I changed the fields to be
POI Name
Address
City
State
PostCode
Latitude
Longitude

Then I clicked "Close" at the bottom of this dialog.

Now - in EPE - I did a "File" > "Open" and navigated to "mapdevelopers.csv" and clicked "Open". EPE knew what the file format was and inputted it.

Now I had a file I could manipulate as I wanted. I could save it back as a basic .csv file by using "1 - User Default" of the "4-Column CSV fields" to describe how to arrange the various fields to conform to the POI Loader expected format of:

Quote:

POI Loader assumes a .csv file utilizes the following format for each POI (brackets [ ] denote optional text):
<Lon>,<Lat>,["]<Name> [@<Alert Speed>]["],["] [comment]["]

Note that EPE's "1 - User Default" - will output a .csv file that has the following fields
Col 1 <Longitude>
Col 2 <Latitude>
Col 3 <POI Name>
Col 4 <Address><br><City><br><State> <Post Code><br>Phone:<Phone><br><br><Description>

Also note that some of these fields can be blank - as there was no "Phone" or "Description" data in my example.

Or I could just save the file as a .gpx file which I find significantly more useful.