I'm using the drive time zone functionality in Map Point a lot, but the software is no longer supported. I was wondering if it was possible to get similar functionality in Excel 2016, I've tried to replicate it in 3D Maps but I couldn't find anything. Does anyone know if this can be done with Excel or any add ins?
I haven't seen anything like this in the Excel 3d Maps or PowerMaps. We have been recommending our MapPoint customers move to Caliper's Maptitude product. Yes this does cost money (as did MapPoint, of course) but has more functionality than MapPoint, data is updated more frequently (and there is more of it), and they have a working, useful support service - more than can be said for Microsoft's support of MapPoint!
The latest versions do support drive time zones, and these can be created using the API. It supports the GIS concept of layers, so the drive time zones are 'drawn' as a polygon (area) layer. This can then be used to query/ manipulate other map layers as per any standard GIS.
(the API has a lot more methods/functions than MapPoint's API, and can be used via COM or Caliper's own macro language)
We've also ported some of our MapPoint products to Maptitude.
An alternative would be to roll your own (or pay someone like me to do it :-) ). If you do this, you would need a source of road data.
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsapps/en-US/e84ec3a9-2ccc-4644-a2e2-70a471848ef8/drivetime-zone-using-bing-map-v8?forum=bingmaps It looks like Bing Maps no longer supports drivetime zones, and all Microsoft mapping is powered by this, so I'm thinking that an Excel option doesn't currently exist. If anyone finds something different that would be very helpful, but for now I'm going on the assumption that it doesn't exist.
Related
Hi guys,
I'm trying to push data from an excel file to a google spreadsheet, using VBA
User Story : When my user close excel, it automatically pushes the data into a back up on google sheet.
I've read some solutions about the Google API, but i do not understand how to use it.
if someone has an explanation it would be nice
Regards,
Thomas
Mixing Excel and Google is going to be a tough journey. They have a lot of compatible features and implementations and then a whole bunch of things that are just not compatible.
You won't be able to control what your users do in Excel so the "backup" may end up as a poor representation of the excel version.
If it is purely for backup, you could go the MSFT route and use OneDrive/O365 which keeps versions for you if you store in a local OneDrive. You can use auto save to keep your backup up to date.
You could go the google route by using sheets on the desktop browser.
As Thomas suggested, go with an off the shelf sync tool if the data and format is straight forward. I have had very mixed results for even some simple stuff.
Not wishing to start a tech-religion war by recommending one over the other but how you are trying to achieve this feels fraught with risk and may be hard to future-proof.
HTH.
I'm starting a project at work where the workers are supposed to get a scanner to scan barcodes on the vares that they use. Optimaly we would have a system supporting this, but we don't.
My thought is to be able to have excel running in the background on the computer they use to several other things, like reading newspapers and looking up todays weather etc. My understading of scanners is that they work just like a keyboard when connected to a computer, problems may then arise if someone is scanning barcodes, and another one is reading the newspaper in internet explorer, maybe the barcodes pops-up as a number in the URL(?), when it really should go to a specific cell in excel.
My question: Is it possible to make a scanner always return its values(scanned barcodes) to excel, EVENTHOUGH the computer may be used to something else at the same time?
Thanks for every thought and comment!
Have a nice weekend!
I do not think Excel would be the best solution to achieve this. It may be possible to achieve by linking to the scanner API and leveraging external libraries to listen for the scanner port etc. However, these kind of applications best be installed as system services e.g. Windows Service or as any other background application in .NET, Java, Python whatever. Excel is not the first choice technology to do these sort of things. Excel, however, can well be used for outputing this data.
What is more, honestly, the solution and feasibility will depend on the scanner API or driver.
I need to work with the 3d model of some places. Google Earth has the 3d building layer with "Gray Buildings" in it. This would be exactly what I would require. Is there any way to get the 3d models that are used? Is there a Google Earth API (other than the Javascript stuff)? (I'm working in .net) that would help?
Or is there at least a manual solution how I can get these models, say, into Sketchup?
Thanks a lot!
While there still isn't support for getting building geometry from Google's APIs, OpenStreetMaps does expose some data you can use. Check out this guide here:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/OpenStreetMap_buildings
Making a request like
http://overpass-api.de/api/xapi?way[bbox=-74.02037,40.69704,-73.96922,40.73971][building=*][#meta]
Will return an XML with building's base outlines and (in some cases) heights. You can use this info to extrude some very simple buildings: http://i.imgur.com/ayNPB.png
To fill in the missing height values (and they're missing on most buildings), I try to use the area of the building's footprint to determine how tall it might be compared to nearby buildings. Unfortunately, until Google is able to make their models public, this will have to do.
There is currently no way to download models from within Google Earth. Also, even is there was - extracting data is against the TOS. Many of the models come from government or private sources so there are issues with licencing the data as a whole. It is worth noting however that a lot of the models in Google Earth are located on the Sketch up 3dwarehouse so maybe you could get that data you want from there?
Also, to work with the javascript api from managed code you might want to check this control library I have put together. Whilst the controls themselves may not be applicable, the ideas behind them should get you under way. http://code.google.com/p/winforms-geplugin-control-library/ essentially there are a series of wrappers and helpers that let you seamlessly integrate the plugin into a winforms application.
You can also read more about Cities in 3d (the name of the project that developed the low-res building layer) here: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwh/citiesin3d/
Our company has a reporting solution utilizing Analysis services + Reporting Services, with excel reports being a priority. Everything's sort of fine, but several annoying things are bothering us:
No ability to rename the sheets
Embedded images stretch the containing cells vertically, thus making scrolling a pain
Cross-sheet links are not supported (turns out that can be implemented using bookmarks)
So my question is basically this - should we try solving these issues somehow (i.e. is that even possible), or should we use some excel rendering extension with more formatting options ? Can you recommend any extensions ?
You may want to take a look at Apose.Cells. I've never used their products, but you can download a free trial and see if it suits your needs.
Alternatively, you can create custom renderer (MSDN)
I had the idea of a search engine that would index web items like other search engines do now but would only store the file's title, url and a hash of the contents.
This way it would be easy to find items on the web if you already had them and didn't know where they came from or wanted to know all the places that something appeared.
More useful for non textual items like images, executables and archives.
I was wondering if there is already something similar?
Check out the wikipedia page on locality sensitive hashing. There's also a good page hosted by a research on MIT.
In general, there are several flavors available: hashes for strings (such as simhash), sets or 0/1 features (such as min-wise hashes), and for real vectors.
The main trick for numerical hashes is basically dimension reduction, so far. For strings, the idea is to come up with a representation that's robust in the face of minor edits.
I'm also doing a little research in this field, although I guess stackoverflow might not be the right place for nascent work.
The question seems to focus on exact match hashes, which we understand better than nearest-neighbor approaches, and are indeed worthwhile, especially if people can share tags and other metadata that way.
As #rjmunro notes, hash-based searching is a popular idea in the P2P world, and Bitzi did pretty much this, though they have shut down and their Bitpedia (Digital Media Encyclopedia) isn't hosted there any more, though some of it at least is still available at Archive.org.
Bitzi also produced software like Bitcollider (SourceForge.net),
and the Magnet URI scheme, which allows for specifying a file by hash and is thus a content-based identifier. Various applications support searching at various databases via Magnet URIs as described at that Wikipedia page.
The same idea is popular in the password-cracking scene - see e.g. findmyhash - Python script to crack hashes using online services etc.
Going a step further, I think it would be great if there were databases and online repositories identifying content by hash and providing tags and other metadata about the content from various perspectives. Then I could leave my music collection in its pristine state (no wasted backup space and time), but still tag them myself and add other metadata, via external tag databases. If my applications knew how to grab the tags, it would seem much better than the current system where we modify and copy around big files just to move tags from e.g. my desktop to my phone.
See a related idea at Metadata Independent Hashing for Media Identification & P2P Transfer Optimisation (pdf).
Well, for images, there's http://tineye.com, which will one-up that, and find you similar images too.
It's not a bad idea. Sometimes I find myself stumbled upon some file trying to figure out where it comes from :) But how are you going to track item's sources? Content can be obtained by various means - web browser, download manager, simply by copying from network share.
If I understand your proposal right, http://bitzi.com/ has done this for a while.