Use Excel with Basecamp

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With the rally season rapidly approaching, I’d been thinking about how to to do better this year (other than somehow getting my Super Sherpa to go faster up hills and upwind). After a dreadful attempt to use a laptop and BaseCamp during the Harvest Rally, I thought it would be more efficient to enter bonus info into Excel as waypoints and then moving them to BaseCamp for route planning and loading the GPS unit. Unfortunately there was no identifiable way to do the transfer. Basecamp pretty much wants to import a GPX file and Excel didn’t export one. Until now.

I’ve prepared an Excel spreadsheet that exports waypoint info into a GPX file that BaseCamp can import. In addition, it provides for coding the waypoints with different icons and obtaining lat/long values for each location.

So how does this help efficiency? In the first test, I entered 56 bonus locations from the Harvest Rally, assigned waypoint icons based on bonus points, obtained lat/long values, exported the waypoints to a GPX file, and imported the file into BaseCamp in under 45 minutes. Of course you still have to plan the route, transfer it to the GPS unit and execute it.

The program is called Boni-Prep and can be downloaded from http://turnlink.net. It works with Windows and newer Mac versions of Excel.

I have high hopes that this will be useful in real world rally use. Please let me know what you think, especially if you currently use another computer aid for planning.