GPS Visualizer Help

Frequently Asked Questions

The FAQ contains a lot of useful information about specific map formats, as well as some more general information about GPS Visualizer.

Form input help file

This is the file that comes up when you click the little "help" icons in the map and profile input forms; it contains explanations of (almost) all the possible form input widgets.

Tutorials

If you have data that came directly from a GPS unit, and you just want to see where you've been, using GPS Visualizer is very easy: you upload the file and you get a map.

For some purposes, though -- including some that take advantage of GPS Visualizer's most powerful features -- the data needs to be organized a little bit before being processed, and that's where these tutorials come in. They're mostly focused on building plain-text comma-separated value (CSV) files or tab-delimited text files -- the kind you would get from a spreadsheet. Assigning a name and coordinates to a point is easy, but what's the best way to assign a color, or a size, or a custom icon? Read on.

• Building Plain-Text Waypoint Files

  No matter what you're trying to do with your data, read this one first! There are a lot of important concepts in this tutorial that will help when you are reading the others.

• Building Plain-Text Track Files

  How to force plain-text data to be interpreted as tracks instead of waypoints; how to include multiple tracks in the same file; how to mix in routes and/or waypoints with track data.

• Geocoding Addresses

  Learn the most efficient ways to deal with points that don't have latitude & longitude yet.

• Mapping Quantitative Data

  Learn how to take advantage of GPS Visualizer's ability to resize and/or colorize points based on any field in your data, and how to make GPS Visualizer perform automatic frequency counts on your location-based data (e.g., ZIP codes).

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©2008 Adam Schneider, .  . E-mail: schneider pobox com.