Using DeLorme Street Atlas USA

In the pre-PC days, taking a trip across town, a state, or the country to visit someplace you’d never been before often involved planning worthy of a major expedition. You’d have to carefully check maps, trying to figure out the shortest and fastest routes, guessing when and where you’d need to stop for gas, scribbling down notes, and highlighting roads on paper maps. That’s all changed with inexpensive and easy-to-use street navigation software. Just run a program on your PC and enter the address of your starting point and the final destination. Then, a few mouse clicks later, you’ve got both a map and exact turn-by-turn directions for how to get from Point A to Point B. And as an added bonus, if you have a laptop and GPS receiver, you can take this software on the road with you, track your location in real-time, and get helpful hints in reaching your destination. (Most street navigation programs also have versions that run on PDAs for ultimate portability.) Several street navigation software packages are on the market that can keep you from getting lost. They all generally work the same, with the primary differences in the user interface and support of advanced features. If you’ve never used a street navigation program before, this chapter gets you moving in the right direction. I focus on DeLorme’s Street Atlas USA, showing you its basic features and how to use them.