This section of the site is intended to contain some tips & Tricks for Mapinfo, and some useful links to websites with Mapinfo Resources.

External Links - Please note that we cannot be held responsible for the content of external links as they may change daily.

Help Websites:

DirectionsMagazine is an area with an invaluable collection of Mapbasic tools, written in the main by the Mapinfo Community. The below link will take you straight to the Mapinfo Downloads area.
Directions Magazine Website

Mapinfo-L is a searchable forum created for the Mapinfo Community. Usually, if you're stuck with a GIS problem, or SQLquery, someone else has either solved the problem, or will help you. A great resource. The link takes you straight to the search page.
Mapinfo-L

Products & Plug-ins:

Vertical Mapper™ is a 3D visualisation tool for Mapinfo. It works as a plug-in and adds additional menu items to your main menu bar. Vertical Mapper helps you display, manage, and interpret grid-based continuous spatial information. If you want answers from location-based data, Vertical Mapper will find them, creating grids, or continuous surfaces of information, from point data by estimating values between known points.
Vertical Mapper on the Mapinfo website

MultiPrint by SGSI is batch map printing software for MapInfo Pro. With SGSI's MultiPrint, just specify a list of MapInfo workspaces, then let MapInfo print each one automatically. We have found this tool extremely useful for batch printing 400 workspaces for a Grounds Maintenance contract.
MultiPrint page on the SGSI website

Maprite by Envitia can be used for Positional Accuracy Improvement work where Ordnance Survey basemap corrections have affected the position of GIS Data. We recommend the Maprite product wholeheartedly, having used the tool for the correction of all the corporate GIS data at East Dorset District Council.
Maprite on the Envitia website

Useful links to the Mapinfo Knowledgebase:

Firstly, anyone who has had problems updating a column with Eastings and Northings (and it puts in Latitude and Longitude) should see the following link. It describes how to set coordsys to BNG (set the coordinate system to BNG) and even how to put it in your Startup.wor so you are never plagued by the problem again! Phew!

Set Coord Sys to BNG

Working with Data

Controlling Table Structure of Imported Excel files

Adding leading zeros to a character field

Opening comma delimited files in MapInfo Professional

Option to save to allow data editing when opening files

Difference between opening an Excel file in MapInfo and making a copy in MapInfo format

Modify the attributes of a browser window

Update records with certain criteria within table without affecting other records

SQL Selecting

Select using a wildcard

Selecting all objects of a certain object type

Finding records that do not have objects

Selecting multiple records with wildcards that have different strings

Finding records using like, not and the percent sign as a wildcard

Selecting points within overlapping buffers

Difference between Contains, Within, and Intersects

Order of tables when joining via the Query>SQL Dialog

Creating a donut and getting the points within

Mapping

Adding a custom symbol

Using Set Clip Region with multiple regions

Converting a table of coordinates to a table of lines

Changing the title of a map window

Finding the missing Info Tool

Turning Zoom layering on and off

Layer Control shows more information using ToolTips

Inserting styles into tables

Changes do not take effect for line/region/symbol style

Creating an inset map

Moving objects using the arrow keys (NUDGE)

Geocode option is grayed out

Produce an outer border on a table of points

Labels

Using and formatting expressions for labeling

Finding

Setting the Default Find Symbol Style to set a default find symbol preference

Find Selection in One Window or All Windows Options

Buffering

Creating buffers based on an existing table structure

Count of points within region

Thematic mapping

Creating a bivariate thematic Map

Shading a region table based on the Count of Points within each region

Custom sort order for Individual Value thematic legends

Set the default behavior of “replace layer style” checkbox

Layout window

How to get a scale bar into a legend window

Setting up a layout window at a particular size and scale

Creating layout templates for use in multiple workspaces

How to create a Layout template with a current date stamp

Legend

Creating a legend that contains only a subset of object types from tables in a map

Changing the number of columns or rows in a cartographic legend frame

Thematic legend is cut off in layout window

Tools

CoordinateExtractor.mbx - extract coordinates from a table

Distance Calculator - selecting the closest or farthest point

Spider Graph – color-coded lines draw between objects

Spider Graph vs. Distance calculator

Dispersing Points

Delete duplicate column values in a table

Synchronize Windows

Search and Replace

Zoom to selection

Workspace resolver

Workspace packager

Output

Copy map window vs. copy

Save window as – additional formats

Printing translucent rasters

Standard procedures in case of printing problems

General Printing Tips and Tricks