Newbie, Tomtom and Microsoft Excell

wjs001 · Occasional Visitor Joined: May 20, 2006 Posts: 5

HI Guys and Gals
Newbie here. Just purchased a tomtom 700 and am over the moon with it. I have had two fitted satnav systems in my previous cars and this is by far the simplest to use, and has the most features. I am in possesion of an excell spreadsheet witch has quite litterally hundreds of points of interest in address format - name - number - street - town - county - country. Is it possible to convert this to tomtom format (I believe it is OV2) and if so how. I appologise if this has been addressed before and a simple link to the appropriate forum would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks in advance and I will pass on as much information to you all as i figure things out and attempt to be a productive member of this group.
Regards
Wayne Laughing

Mullet · Frequent Visitor Joined: Dec 12, 2005 Posts: 1051

Use POI converter, then add a 22x22 pixel bitmap icon for the POI.
http://rjdavies.users.btopenworld.com/html/poiconverter.html

Oldboy · Posted: Sat May 20, 2006 7:27 pm Post subject:

wjs001 · Occasional Visitor Joined: May 20, 2006 Posts: 5

:D Thank you so much for that information, I will use it wisely. Just a couple of added points - Can you recomend a program to make the 22x22 images and secondly, I cannot seem to get it to import the names so all I get is POI or a number (I have imported 130 names and addresses). Can anyone offer up advise. Cheers Yall.
Wayne

Andy_P · Posted: Mon May 22, 2006 4:50 pm Post subject:

Any "paint" program should be able to make the icons, even Microsoft "Paint" which is included with all versions of Windows (although it is pretty awful for anything more complex it will do this! Open up a new drawing window, go to "Image" on the menu, select "Attributes" and change the width and height to 22 (with units set to pixels in the box below). Good luck - its like drawing with a very small etch-a-sketch!

Other paint programs include Paintshop Pro, Photopaint, Photoshop (serious money) but there are loads of shareware progs too.

Oldboy · Posted: Mon May 22, 2006 7:56 pm Post subject:

wjs001 · Occasional Visitor Joined: May 20, 2006 Posts: 5

Thank you so so so much. Right we are nearly there. All imported with names (I've had to include an extra column in excel with numbers 101 - 231 instead of 1-130 but what the hell). All that is left for me to do is get the bitmap 22x22 image next to the favourites name on the tom tom. Any ideas. By the way if any wants to contact me regarding this whole procedure I willl be most happ to help anyone. Next week its planning routes so I will need all the help I can get Laughing Out Loud

.
Cheers

Wayne

999tommo · Posted: Mon May 22, 2006 10:40 pm Post subject:

Once you have created your bitmaps (22x22 pixels) using Microsoft Paint or whatever, (I use MS Paint as it is simple) you must name the bitmap to exactly the same name as your ov2 files of POIs. So if your ov2 file is named Friends.ov2, then your bitmap for that POI type must be named Friends.bmp and both the ov2 file and the bmp must be saved in your map folder (usually Great_Britain_Map) found in the root directory of your TT. You will not be able to create a separate bitmap icon for each of your addresses as the TT is limited to only 39 user POI groups.
_________________
Tommo...

Regularly absent, but still here in spirit !

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