wrote on Oct 24^th, 2010 at 7:50pm:

You will not believe how far you can go by lesson 51.

[MT and I shared a few PM's about this topic last week.]

And by lesson 67 we might event start talking about importing/exporting/converting files between/among MapSource, Memory Maps, ArcGIS and other mapping tools ... or even making map data from data that starts out as an excel spreadsheet or database ... what fun!

Hey, I've been playing with this stuff for a while.  My first successful personal mapping project was 20+ years ago.  Back then, I could find data (DLG format from USGS, for example) for all of the US, but had some difficulty finding software to process it.  Before writing my own, I actually discovered that faculty and students at the U.S. Naval Academy had a version they would share with the public.  It struck me funny at the time that the U.S. Navy would be interested in topographical maps until I realized that the mountains in which they were most interested were under water.  It also came with a wire-frame "fly through" feature ... like driving a submarine through a submerged canyon.  (I guess this also explains why the software didn't differentiate between land and water).  Of course, my interested lay more in navigating canyons and mountain ranges in Colorado.

dd