Using MapInfo Professional

All current commonly used versions of MapInfo Professional are able to open ESRI shapefiles without direct translation. However, for ease of use within MapInfo, it is recommended that users use the universal translator within MapInfo to convert the shapefile supply to MapInfo .TAB files prior to loading the data. This will be described in the procedures for loading the data.

Loading and Displaying Shapefile Supply

In MapInfo Professional, start universal translator from the ‘Tools’ menu.

Select the translate button at the top left hand side of the dialog box.

In the next box, the user will need to select the translation parameters required. These will include the format of the files being translated, the format to which the data is being translated and the location of the data.

Once selected, click ‘OK’. The translation will then run.

A message box will appear when the process in complete. The user will now have a MapInfo .TAB file for the selected layer of OS OpenMap-Local. This procedure will have to be repeated for all of the layers within OS OpenMap-Local which are required.

To load the created MapInfo .TAB files into MapInfo Professional simply click ‘File – Open’ and navigate to where the files reside. Select the file to be opened. Select ‘new mapper’ from the drop-down menu and click ‘OK’. For successive layers (if loading one layer at a time) select ‘current mapper’ as some of the data is already loaded. A point to note is that MapInfo Professional will open the data un-styled. The screenshot below shows the TQ Buildings and roads layers loaded.

Styling the data

MapInfo Professional, unlike many other GI applications, is better styled at translation stage because the .TAB format used by MapInfo can retain all of the styling information applied in the translation process – it does not use separate styling files to apply a style to the data. OS OpenMap-Local at the current time is not supplied in MapInfo .TAB format. Therefore, there is no Ordnance Survey published styling information for use in MapInfo Professional at the present time. It is however possible to style the data manually in MapInfo and achieve a pleasing result.

To add a style to a layer which has been loaded, open up the layer control window and then select the style override box;

Click the button and a new region style window will appear. It will then be necessary to select a colour for both the fill and the border for the layer to be styled. When the box containing a number of basic colours appears, select the very south east box (with the …. pattern in it) and the next window pops up which will allow a specific RGB value to be entered.

Select a suitable RGB layer for the foreground and then for the border. The selected style will now appear for the layer. Repeat this procedure for all of the other layers in OS OpenMap-Local.

For the layers within OS OpenMap-Local which require different styles to be applied to different attributes within the layer, it is necessary within MapInfo to select out the different attributes using a query. Once the attribute is selected, it will be possible to style on that attribute, either within the original .TAB file or by creating a new subset .TAB file. This second option will be described here as it allows the end user to have more flexibility in terms of layer ordering and allows different subsets of OS OpenMap - Local to be loaded and used for different requirements.

The example below shows a few of the elements of the ‘roads’ layer have already been styled;

In the example following, another element of the OS OpenMap-Local ‘roads’ layer will be styled by creating a new .TAB file for the ‘Primary Roads Collapsed Dual Carriageway’ element of the TQ_Roads layer.

Firstly, from the main menu, select ‘Query’ and ‘SQL Select’.

In the window that follows enter into the relevant boxes the information required to pull out the primary roads, collapsed dual carriageway element of the roads layer;

When creating the new table be sure that the table name being assigned does not contain spaces. Click ‘OK’. MapInfo will now create a new .TAB file query for that element of the data. To save out this query as a .TAB file select from the main menu, ‘File, Save Copy As..’ and then select the name of the table.

Then click the ‘Save As’ button.

At the next window, select the location for the .TAB file and then click ‘OK’. Click ‘File, open’ at the main menu and select the newly created table.

Once selected, click ‘OK’. The new table will appear in the layer control window.

The user can now style this table with an appropriate style as required. A result of this may look like the following depending upon what style is selected.

This procedure will have to be repeated for other elements of the roads layer as required. In OS OpenMap-Local, the functional sites, roundabouts and roads layers will require this approach. All of the other layer elements can be styled on a simple individual basis.

Merging multiple .TAB files in MapInfo Professional

In MapInfo it is possible to merge the elements of two .TAB files together into one new table using the ‘append’ function. This only works for data tables of the same type and will only work for two .TAB files at a time. Please note that the file into which the new data is appended will need to be saved as a new table at the end of the process. This append process will have to be repeated for all elements of the OS OpenMap-Local data if two areas are required.

If the user wishes to merge elements of more than two .TAB files together at the same time, for example, if there was a requirement to combine the elements of TQ, SU and TL together; the user would have to use another solution. A number of custom built script files have been written for MapInfo and are available on the internet. An alternative would be to use the freely available open-source GIS QGIS to merge the shapefiles together before creating the .TAB files in MapInfo. The user should be aware that these merged tables will contain duplicate features.

The example shows the result of appending the SU_Roads element of OS OpenMap-Local into the TQ_Roads table. The ‘TQ_Roads_merged’ table should be saved as a copy of the TQ_Roads table to keep the merged data.

Deleting Duplicate entries from the merged table

There are several ways of doing this in MapInfo Professional. One of the ways to use SQL queries is described in the MapInfo knowledge base article which can be found here: