by John Keltner
NOAA Paleoclimatology Program
Boulder, Colorado

If you use Microsoft Windows 3.1+ (Windows NT, or soon, Windows 95); and your interests involve sites that can be plotted on a map; and you have text or image information that is associated with your sites; and you wish you had a simple, easy-to-use (and very reasonably priced) piece of software that would allow you to show the world what you've been doing all these years: Read On!

Step One - Acquisition

Unfortunately, MapPad is not utterly without obstacles or cost. You must get on to the information superhighway (the Internet) and drive (ftp) down to the National Geophysical Data Center in Boulder, Colorado (ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov) and properly identify yourself (anonymous + your email address as a password) to get (binary mode of course) your copy (mappad11.exe in /paleo/softlib/mappad). (If you have access to the World Wide Web then you can have the chauffeur take you to http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/paleo.html and follow the side-road marked Free Software!)

Step Two - Setup

Now clear your desk so that you can begin the installation process. Find or create an empty directory on your harddisk (mine's called C:\SETUP) and copy or move mappad11.exe into that directory. Now you have to get to the venerable DOS prompt, and get into that previously empty directory you made, and do a little typing (i.e., in the C:\SETUP directory type mappad11.exe). The result of all this is that you now have some 20-odd more files in that once empty directory, but wait, you are not done.

Now get back to Windows, and select Run from the Program Manager's File menu and this time type: c:\setup\setup.exe (assuming you followed my example and extracted the setup files into a directory on the C: drive named \SETUP) and click the Ok button. MapPad's setup program will ask you a few simple questions and almost before you know it, MapPad will be installed. Your Program Manager should now have a new program group called MapPad with two icons in it: one for MapPad itself and one for a read-me file that mostly just tells you to use MapPad's Help to find out more about using MapPad.

Step Three - Test Drive

Now that the hard part is over, let's see what MapPad looks like and how it works. Double-click the MapPad icon and behold the Sample datafile (Figure 1, left, a bibliography from the North American Pollen Database - NAPD). The Sample datafile was included for you to explore MapPad's features and capabilities. Let's do that.

MapPad is very simple indeed to operate. Place your mouse cursor over the map. Now click and drag the mouse to draw out a box. Release the mouse button. MapPad zooms the map to display the area you outlined. You can repeat this action to zoom further, or you can click the Previous button to undo the last zoom. If you click the Initial button MapPad restores the original map.

If you click on one of the sites shown on the map (this is made somewhat easier by first zooming), the name of that site appears in the button that is located over the map. If you then click that button, MapPad opens up a NotePad-style window (Figure 2, left) with the text information associated with that site (double-clicking the site opens the NotePad at once).

From the NotePad window you can add, edit, delete, or print information about the site. You can also search for or search and replace text. If there are any images (pictures, sound, movies) associated with the site you can display them by selecting the image in the Image menu (see Help for more information on referencing and displaying images).

Step Four - Personalization

Learning something about the work of the North American Pollen Database is all well and good, but MapPad was really designed for you to add your sites and your information to a map. In the File menu you can select New Datafile to create your own datafile (give it a path and filename, pick the map you want to use, perhaps give your new datafile a title). To add one of your sites to your new datafile, select New Site (Figure 3, above) from the File menu. Type in the site's latitude and longitude, enter its name, and click Ok. Your site is drawn on the map, and an empty NotePad window opens for you to add whatever text information you like.

If you create more than one datafile (or have traded MapPad datafiles with your friends) you can switch between them by selecting Open Datafile from the File menu.

Step Five - Euphoria

So now that you've added your sites to your datafile, and you've shown everyone at home and at work the results (and they are impressed), what about the rest of the world? Well, one nice thing about MapPad datafiles is that they are just ASCII text files (with a few formatting rules), so you can e-mail them to almost anyone and they will be able to read them. You can also print the map (zoomed if you so choose) with your sites on it to create an overhead; or save it as a Windows metafile for importation into a graphics package like CorelDraw to add nice captions or labels.

If at this point you are looking around for someone to thank, then drop Lou Maher a line (maher@geology.wisc.edu), MapPad was his idea. If on the other hand, the unthinkable has happened and setup died or MapPad is not behaving as advertised, then send that message to me. (And if you noticed blank space on the NAPD map where your pollen sites should be, then by all means contact Eric Grimm, grimm@museum.state.il.us, to find out how to contribute your data!)

John Keltner, NOAA Paleoclimatology Program, 325 Broadway E/GCx3, Boulder, Colorado 80303, U.S.A. jkeltner@ngdc.noaa.gov

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This article first appeared in CAP Newsletter 18(1):18-21, 1995.