PC Miler WorldWide - Guide to Advanced Configurations

CONGRATULATIONS!

In minutes, you have calculated driving directions, maps and distances for several routes. As you can see, PC Miler Worldwide is fast and easy to use.

Now that you have completed the basic Guided Tour, continue on to the Advanced Tour to Import Your Own Custom Places and Change the Trip Parameters. The Advanced Tour will give you a look at some additional features of PC Miler Worldwide!

Change the Trip Parameters

NOTE: Do not change trip parameters the first time you take the Guided Tour, except where prompted. Changed parameters alter generated routes and calculations, and may make the tour hard to follow. Parameters should only be adjusted once you are familiar with the basics of PC Miler Worldwide.

PC Miler Worldwide lets you choose from a variety of criteria that will give your routes much more flexibility and efficiency. Please take this opportunity to fully examine the options listed below. We suggest that you generate some sample routes with modified parameters, so that you can see for yourself how these changes will affect driving directions and calculations. (You might want to take the Guided Tour again, with different options.)

To change a trip’s parameters, first click on the Options button in the route entry window. Then click on the appropriate tab (General Options, Costs and Time, or Road Speeds).

General Options:

Assign your trip a name by typing in the Route Name field (this name appears in the title bar of the route entry window).

Change the route type by selecting Practical, Shortest, Toll Discouraged, National Network, or 53' Trailer. (NOTE: The last three types are available only for the North American region.)

Designate your State/Country Distance report format by selecting Alphabetical or Route.

Change the distance calculations by selecting Miles or Km.

Activate Hub Mode by clicking on Hub Routing.

Activate routing between countries by clicking on Borders Open, or keep routing within a country by deselecting it.

Checking Use Custom Roads tells PC Miler Worldwide to use any road preferences (such as avoided and favored roads) that have been designated on the map or in the Custom Roads Manager.

Costs and Time:

Assign a cost for empty and loaded miles by clicking on the appropriate field under Trip Costs and entering your own cost per mile (or kilometer).

Under Stop Costs, select each stop from the pick list and use the check box next to Loaded to change the trip leg from loaded to empty or vice versa. Assign costs per stop by typing an amount in the $/Stop field, and designate a stop time by typing stop duration in the Hours/Stop field

Use the On-Duty check box to specify whether the time assigned to this stop should be considered as on-duty when break times are calculated.

In the Break every fields, type in the number of driving hours allowed before a break is required and the length of the break time. (This facilitates drivers’ compliance with DOT Hours of Service Regulations.)

Add a Border Wait time for expected delays at international borders.

Road Speeds:

To set a road speed by state or country, select the state\country from the pick list (use the up and down arrow keys to scroll to the state) and type the new speed in the appropriate field.

Click on the OK button to save your changes. The active route will be automatically recalculated with the new parameters you entered.

Import Your Own Custom Places

NOTE: For a more detailed description of this process, see Importing Sets of Custom Places in the PC Miler Worldwide User’s Guide or on-line Help.

Earlier in the Guided Tour, you learned how to create your own custom places from within PC Miler Worldwide. By using the Import Custom Place Wizard, you can also import groups of custom places from a delimited text file or a MicrosoftÒ ExcelÒ file (version 4.0 or earlier). If you have such a file available, let’s import a set of custom places:

Select Import Custom Places from the Tools menu.

In the Open file dialog box that appears, select the file that contains your custom place data. (Don’t forget to specify the type of file you are importing in the Files of type field.)

The Geocode File window will appear. Your data should appear in the table at the bottom of the screen. If the first row of data is comprised of column headings rather than custom place information, check off First row contains column headings.

If the data in your file was separated by a delimiter, specify in the Delimeter area whether it was by Tab, Comma, Semicolon, or Space.

Now you will label each of the columns that contain data, so that PC Miler Worldwide knows what type of information it is. With your left mouse button, click on the heading labelled “Skip” above each data column. Select the proper category for each column heading from the list that appears.

Click on the Options button to open the Geocoding Options window. Under Records to Process, choose “Selected”, and enter “1 to 50” in the two fields beside it (it’s okay if you have fewer than 50 places in your file).
Then click OK at the bottom of this window. You will be returned to the Geocode File window.

You have prepared your file for PC Miler Worldwide to read and compare with its own database, so click OK in the Geocode File window. The Wizard will begin to process your data.

As your custom place information is being processed, a Results window is visible. This window lets you know how the data matching is progressing. The statistics are updated in real-time. They tell you if your custom places were matched with a location in the PC Miler Worldwide database or not, and if the matches were exact or inexact.

When processing is finished, an expanded Results dialog appears that tells you how many and which records were matched with the database.

Next to Add selected places to near the bottom of the dialog, check both Custom Place Manager and Route Entry Window. When both are selected, your custom places will be sent to the Custom Place Manager, and will also be added to a route entry window as a set of stops on a route.

Click on the Options button to activate the Custom Place Manager Options dialog box. Under Adding places to route entry window, select Create a new window.

To finish importing your custom places into PC Miler Worldwide, click Add. In this case, the custom places that will be imported will be the ones marked as “Accepted” -- database matches, labelled with a “+”. (This window also allows you to alter each data record, and change the places to be added to PC Miler Worldwide. But to keep this tour simple, we’ll only add Accepted stops. See the PC Miler Worldwide User’s Guide for more information.)

The Custom Place Manager will appear with your imported places now displayed as “custom places”. Click OK to accept the additions.

The Import Custom Place Wizard is visible once again. Now that you are done importing your custom places, click OK. You can proceed to exit the Wizard because your custom places have already been added.

You will now be returned to the PC Miler Worldwide desktop. Notice that you have added a new route entry window, with your imported places listed as stops!