Creating territories is one of the most common tasks performed with MapInfo Pro. Most people create territories by combining two or more smaller regions to create a larger one. Police departments combine postal code boundaries to create precinct boundaries. Sales managers combine county boundaries or state boundaries to create sales territories. Political analysts combine census tract boundaries to create voting districts.
Remember, when you are combining regions, you are also combining the data associated with the regions. If you combine regions without somehow aggregating the data associated with the regions, that data will be lost. For some applications, you might not want to save your data. For example, you are merging census tract boundaries to create school districts. The census tract data is of no interest to you; you merely want the boundaries. There is no reason to aggregate the data, but you would want to apportion the demographic data. For most tasks, you'll want to save the data associated with the regions.
MapInfo Pro gives you three methods for combining regions.
- The first method, Combine, works with objects that are selected.
- The second method, Combine Objects Using Column, is used to combine objects into groups based on a specified column.
- The third method, Redistricting, is covered in Redistricting-Grouping Map Objects into Districts.
Most frequently, the Combine Regions options are your easiest and quickest options for combining regions and creating territories.