This is the #MapInfoMonday article #100!
We thought it would be a good time to celebrate a bit and look back at some of the "winner" articles from the last two years.
As a small gift for our loyal readers, we have included a document with all the #MapInfoMonday articles. Each article in the document has a link to the original post giving you a chance to comment on the article or ask questions.
The first ever #MapInfoMonday
During a weekend in August 2020, I decided to start posting some small tips & tricks to the MapInfo Pro users on the MapInfo Pro community. The idea was to post these tips and tricks every Monday. That's when #MapInfoMonday was born.
I never imagined that 2 years later this would still be going strong and that we now can celebrate article #100.
The first article covered the capability to make labels not selectable in a map window. It was published on August 31st, 2020.
This article is a good example of how one customer conversation can lead to an improvement in MapInfo Pro. The day after Mark Duffett asked for a similar feature for images, and after some ping-pong, a new request was added to the list of new features for MapInfo Pro v2021. Fast forward to May 2021, and we had this implemented in a pre-release of MapInfo Pro v2021.
Engagement Award
I want to highlight two articles that sparked engagement.
The first one is an article where I showed how you can move the centroid of a polygon after someone asked me this very question a few days earlier. This started multiple conversations including why you would want to move the centroid and whether a centroid should or could be moved. This article is also the most recommended article amongst the #MapInfoMonday articles.
The second article I want to highlight provided an example of how to use Python to create multiple outputs. The discussion for this one revolved around the benefits of Python compared to MapBasic, and Bob Fortin suggested the idea of creating a dynamic GIFF from the exported images. That resulted in another article where the multiple outputs were merged into a dynamic GIFF. Several months later, MapInfo Pro v2021 was released with support for Time Series allowing you to achieve this out of the box.
Most viewed #MapInfoMonday
Diving a bit into the analytics to see which post has been viewed most, is a bit skewed because we switched to Precisely analytics a year ago and the views prior to this are not included.
The most viewed article is from @John Ievers from our partner CDR Group. John shared some insights about getting multiple thematic layers into a PDF document. This was based on a customer support case they had worked on just before creating the post.
In the second place, we find an article covering the new Select by Attribute feature that was added to MapInfo Pro v2021. This is probably one of the features in v2021 that most users like so it doesn't surprise me to see the high number of views on this article.
My Personal Favorites
That's a hard one. There are a lot of good articles but if I had to pick a few I would choose some that discuss my favorite features of MapInfo Pro too.
I use SQL for many things working in MapInfo Pro, and really think this is somewhat underrated so I would recommend getting started using SQL more. For this, I would recommend two articles to get you started: Five Basic SQL Select Statements and Five Basic Spatial SQL Select Statements.
And if I'm allowed I also want to highlight an article with a use case from agriculture where the raster capabilities are used to locate thistles in a field.
Which articles have been your favorites? And what articles would you like to see moving forward?
PS: Here is a full list of the #MapInfoMonday articles with the most recent at the top.
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Peter Horsbøll Møller
Principal Presales Consultant | Distinguished Engineer
Precisely | Trust in Data
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