Product Description

microsoft autoroute 2007 europe

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #341 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: 689-00901
• Released on: 2006-10-27
• Platform: Windows XP
• Format: DVD-ROM
• Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .26 pounds

Features

• AutoRoute 2007 Euro EN DVD Win32

Manufacturer's Description
Going to Europe? Use Microsoft AutoRoute 2007, the customizable route planning software that provides accurate driving directions and helps you easily explore new areas, so you can make the most of your trip in Europe. With more personalized trip planning features than major online mapping sites and map coverage of more than 37 countries, AutoRoute 2007 gets you where you're going quickly, easily, and without all the guesswork.

Microsoft AutoRoute 2007 gives you accurate driving directions to lots of destinations in 37 countries, plus more trip-planning features than major online mapping Web sites. Instantly find more than 747,000 points of interest such as hotels, restaurants, ATMs, museums, campgrounds, and more. Live Search makes it easy to find current business listings when you're online then take them with you on the road. Get accurate, detailed door-to-door directions along 3.9 million miles of road and motorway throughout Europe.

Plan breaks, scenic detours and petrol stops - you can even add multiple destinations or quickly alter your route with simple drag-and-drop controls. Personalize your maps with drawings, notes and pushpins to mark important information. Import your contacts into your maps and routes directly from Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Office Excel. Use your customized travel guide on-screen as you go, or print it out in a variety of helpful formats. You can even e-mail it to your friends or post it online!

Customer Reviews

Okay but no great improvement on previous versions
The major and most obvious improvement in Autoroute 2007 is the integration of place relevant search terms with Windows Live. Details, including sat picture details of place names and specific locations, can now be displayed at the click of an icon

Other than that there's not much I can see to suggest that there's any need to upgrade from Autoroute 2006 (which can now be bought quite cheaply).

The map coverage of Europe is very disappointing though. There's very little coverage, other than main road coverage, of eastern Europe beyond the German border. Maps of parts of northern Europe including Sweden and Finland are also very sparsely detailed as well - maps of Spain and Italy also don't enjoy the detail I was hoping for. Most Europe wide dedicated sat nav units have maps that provide high quality road mapping data. Not Autoroute. Autoroute's mapping provider Navteq provides the detailed data which isn't however included in the Autoroute maps.

But this is a slick bit of software to be sure - the interface is intuitive to use and the screen formatting is very clever.

I haven't managed to replicate the routing bug reported by another review (London to Heysham) and, so far, no bugs are obvious.

I would recommend Autoroute and as long as your expectations, in terms of European mapping detail aren't too high, you'll probably be impressed. For UK and Ireland mapping it's the best there is.

And it's still broken
Following on from the fiasco of AutoRoute 2006 where they managed to miss most of the postcodes and the one's they did have were often miles away from where they should be, I was eagerly awaiting the latest release, since competitor products just aren't as good.

The 2nd route I attempted to calculate was London to Heysham, and AutoRoute 2007 thinks I should drive to Liverpool, catch the ferry to the Isle Of Man and then catch a ferry back to Heysham !!!!

This is a minor annoyance that requires adding a via, the main problem with AutoRoute is that Microsoft never releases updates for it to fix problems, so this bug and any further ones discovered will remain until 2008.

Not really useful as an upgrade
This was a Christmas present as I'd recently passed my driving and was borrowing a car over the festive season. Someone thought that it may be of use to aid in my planning and navigation for the long haul journies which I'd planned. The interface is very similar to recent previous versions making it easy to use and there are some nice touches to some features like printing out different styles of routes or directions. You can also use a GPS connected to a laptop for mobile users although it could only find COM ports on my laptop and not my USB GPS device so I never got to play with that feature. I got the impression though that you can use Autoroute 2007 in the same way as TomTom as it gives you the option to install some speech software. There are some other minor points and it is not as up to date as the version 2007 would have you believe.
For a start, some pubs in my home town which have since changed hands over two years ago are listed by their previous names where as others which have been established for years are not even shown. So if you were planning on using pubs as an established form of land mark then forget it. Also, not all service stations are listed for the motorways which made planning stops on routes a little awkward. In reality, I found that practically all junctions of the M1 have services other than the 4 shown in Autoroute 2007. Directions refer to slips roads of motorways as ramps and one particular route gave me the wrong exit off a roundabout at a junction. When exporting the maps to Pocket Streets, I found that they were incompatible with Pocket Streets on my PDA and I could not export them as a previous version.
This all said, the product is quite good as an overview tool and to be fair there is a lot of information to cram in so you would expect some anomalies. However, there is no update feature and no updates on Microsoft's web :(

Given that this was a gift, I'm not really complaining or being ungrateful for recieving it. Having used it though, I couldn't justify the expense of buying it myself.