Streets & Trips gives you lots of options for planning your trips. In addition to creating a route using the Find Places feature, you can create a custom route and travel schedule based on your personal itinerary and driving style.

Using your own contact information, and customizing maps with your own destinations and reminders, you can easily plan your trips your own way. Here's how to get started.

Set your personal driving preferences

What's your driving style? Do you prefer highways or side streets? The quickest route or stops with breaks along the way? Streets & Trips automatically provides you with the quickest route possible based on types of roads and other key information – but you can also set your own personal travel preferences to get a customized route.

To set personal preferences:

1. In the Route Planner pane, click More Route Options. Or, on the Route menu, click More Options.
2. Click one of the tabs to customize Streets & Trips for a particular trip:

Profile. Provide your preferences for the time of day during which you want to drive and how often you will take rest stops.

Driving speeds. Provide information about whether you expect to drive faster or slower than average on different types of roads.

Fuel. Provide information about what gas mileage you get, how big your gas tank is, and when you want to be notified that you should stop for gas.

Costs. Enter the price of gas, and Streets & Trips will provide a cost summary for your trip.

Segments. Choose the type of driving you prefer for each segment of your trip, and Streets & Trips will find the best route for you. Click Quickest to travel as quickly as possible by using major highways and arterials. Or, click Shortest to take the shortest route between two destinations based on distance only. When you click Preferred Roads, you can also click Preferred Road Types to define the roads you want to travel on.

Tips

• To quickly create a route, right-click a place or pushpin on the map, point to Route, and then click one of the routing commands.
• To quickly add stops to a calculated route, select the route on the map (the route's highlighted color changes to blue), and then drag the route to the location you want to add. The route is snapped to include the new stop and the directions are automatically updated.
• To find the fastest route for a route that has several stops, click Optimize Stops.

Import your data and contact information into your map

Do you have a number of addresses from your personal contacts to visit? You can import data and contacts from Microsoft Office Outlook or text files.

1. On the Data menu, click Import Data Wizard.
2. Select the source file you want to import, and click Open.
3. Within the source file, choose the dataset that you want Streets & Trips to use. For example, if you are importing from Excel, you will need to select the desired sheet or range. If importing from Access, you can select a specific table.
4. After selecting the data, click Next. If you did not have to choose a sheet, range, table or separator character, skip this step.
5. Following the Data Wizard prompts, select the data type for each column of data, the Country/Region that pertains to the data, and specify if the first row of your data contains column headings.
6. Click Finish.

You can now quickly add your contacts onto any map as destinations, or instantly forward your travel plans to your contacts by e-mail.

Customize your maps

Maps can be customized to include not only your own contact information, but notes and visual reminders. Here's how Streets & Trips 2009 helps you customize maps.

Drawing and map annotation tools

Streets & Trips offers familiar drawing tools, similar to those found in Microsoft Office system applications, which allow you to highlight areas, draw straight and freehand lines, add arrows, display radii, insert text, add pushpins, and more. With this comprehensive set of drawing tools you can create a travel plan that totally matches your driving style and your goals for your trip.

Importing custom symbols and pushpins

Place icons, pictures, graphics, logos or formatted text from other applications as visual elements virtually anywhere on your maps, simply by importing them as custom symbols. Just follow these steps.

1. On the Standard toolbar, click the arrow next to Create pushpin.
2. Click Import Custom Symbol.
3. In the Look In box, type or select the name of the folder that contains the symbol you wish to use.
4. Click the name of the custom symbol file in the list, and then click Open. Your custom symbol is imported into Streets & Trips and added to the list of available symbols. You can then use it just as you would any standard pushpin symbol.