Although search remains Google’s flagship product, the power and utility ofGoogle Maps makes it an essential tool for anyone with a smartphone. Now, the app is unveiling yet another enhancement called Google Maps Engine Pro.
The new tool, which costs $5 per month, allows businesses to move data from a variety of files (including CSV, TSV, XLSX, My Maps and spreadsheets) directly into Google Maps. Once the data has been imported into Google Maps Engine Pro, businesses can create interactive, geographic maps full of valuable internal information, such as inventory data, office locations and sales leads.
In addition to data-manipulation tools, Google Maps Engine Pro enables users to heavily customize the way a map appears, down to the color of marker pins, as well as the gradation and border thickness of specific zones. The tool also lets users create layers of maps, offering easy access to different sets of data within the same geographic location, simply by moving to another layer.
Finally, the maps that businesses create are private by default, but can easily be shared with colleagues; this makes the tool a particularly attractive option for organizations spread out over multiple locations
To give potential users an idea of how Google Maps Engine Pro works, the company created a video, above, which uses California-based Pure Fix Cycles as an example.
“By providing better ways to easily integrate maps into your organization’s operations, businesses now have the ability to use powerful mapping technologies that were once only available to the mapping experts," Brian McClendon, Google's vice-president of engineering for Maps, said in an official blog post.
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