BUILDING YOUR OWN PERSONAL DATA BASE (at your desk!)

 

Now that I am starting to understand the nuances of POI files, and realized that I can construct my own, it makes entering a lot of data (a lot of stops) much easier and posting them to the Garmin Street Pilot i5.

It is NOT necessary to enter a number of addresses, such as I want to do every week for garage sales, using the thumb wheel and going through the same State, and Town for each entry.

I originally thought that a POI data file was just an Excel file with the longitude, latitude, and name, and then saving it with the proper extension. After I entered a few POIs and had that file in the correct folder, the data would not transfer, but when I just added the same data to the "North Pole" file, it accepted them all.

Now I sit down with the paper with all the Garage Sale ads. I use one window with the POI file I am building, and another window using TerraServer. I enter the address into TerraServer and immediately get the Long. & Lat. coordinates. I enter those into the spreadsheet and call it "14 Willow - Fri&Sat"

When I have entered all the stops I download it to the Garmin, and it always shows me which is the next nearest stop to where I am!

What a great tool, and many, many thanks to ALL OF YOU who were so helpful. I am an old dog who CAN learn new tricks. If I told you my age, you wouldn't believe me, so let's leave it at that.

--
(BBQ Man)

Does anyone know of any

Does anyone know of any other websites that gives coordinates like TerraServer does?

--
(BBQ Man)

Nice tip for i-series

Thanks for posting your garage sale tip.

Entering a list of addresses using the thumb-wheel on a Garmin i-Series model is pretty tedious. Doing the work ahead of time with your computer makes things go alot more smoothly.

... so you might be old enough to remember the first man-made satellites going into orbit? wink

JM

I was still in my teens when

I was still in my teens when I got a job in Peoria (I'm from New York originally) at the NBC radio & TV affiliate. I was in the news room when the AP ticker started ringing its 10-bell alarm that meant news was breaking. I ran over to the teletype and found out that the USSR had launched Sputnik!

--
(BBQ Man)

thanks

When Jon and I were starting to talk about this website idea I had this dream that some day I would be able to log onto the local newspapers website and just click on the garage sales that I wanted to go to and I could download them into my gps and have it take me to all of them.
My career before this was as a Realtor and this would have been a great tool to use to impress clients when showing homes.
Maryann

lat/long site

Just found this site-- http://geocoder.us
It give lat/long for any address, and its free!

It gives lat first, which should not be a big deal if you're using excel. I don't even own a GPS yet (still researching), but I'm very excited about making/using POIs.

Geocoder.us

Thanks phiblue29,

Looks like a good website. Very easy to use!

When you narrow down your GPS choices, I'm sure there are plenty of people here that can give you some good advice on which one to buy. I purchased the Garmin c330 about a month ago and I am very happy with it. Some of the newer models look great. If only money wasn't an object smile

Whichever unit you choose, I'm sure you will enjoy it. Thanks for contributing and welcome to the website.

added link from the help page

I've added a link to geocoder.us from the faq & help section. Thanks for the tip.

JM