Bill wrote:- > (Oh, there may > still be a Mac MapInfo zombie or two lurching around out there, > so I didn't throw away the old stuff. ...Yet.) > Well, yes there is a one or two of us - zombie? I think so sometimes when I hear about all the 'u beaut ' thing you guys are upto. I'm saddled with a substanial investment in Mac from a pervious partnership. At the moment I am working through the intergation of MapInfo with an off the shelf PIM for our covenant services. It has taken sometime to work out the combination of packages due mainly to the limited software available on the Mac platform. I only hope that the success of the iMac gets a few more software houses writing for MacOS again - the trick was to get a PIM that had a compatible file format to the GIS package. The idea was to 'map' aspects of the covenant delivery services such as approval dates; house size etc. Whilst a standard database could have managed that - we also wanted to use the PIM to handle all contacts associated with the approval process ie. phone calls; letters etc. This too could have been done by writing an application from scratch - but to us non-program types the investment in time or money to get someone to do it was prohibitive (however, that may be the way we go later). There were a number of options for PC based systems - but for Mac I couldn't find one. Still, I persisted and managed to get something to work via ACT! v2.8 and MapInfo v4.0 (both of these are poor cousins to their PC versions. ACT! is version 4 or 5 for PC - and MapInfo is version 5 for PC. The trick was that ACT! native format was DBF and MapInfo supported the DBF file format. One small quirk is that if you modify the structure of the DBF with MapInfo, ACT! can no longer read it - you've stuffed the file. That is not the case with the data - MapInfo can modify the data okay. Another problem I can't seem overcome is that in reading the date fields from the PIM, MapInfo regards them as character fields - which means a certain amount of gymatics with files is required to then map thematically the date data. However, the basics work fine - the PIM tracks both the lot data and contact history - all presented in glourious map form. I'm sure all these things would be a lot smoother via PC - one day....... Regards Martyn ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put "unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
