How to Create Your Own POI Data for TomTom?

You can create your own POIs for use on your TomTom. Eventually they need to be in the ov2 file format. It’s easiest, however, to use a text editor (eg, Notepad) to create the file, and then convert it to ov2 format. Two reasons for that: 1) ov2 files can’t be read by text editors; 2) text files are much easier to work with.

Note a couple of important things:

• The descriptions need to be in quotes. ****It’s important that the quote marks be “ditto mark” quotes, rather than “curly” quotes.**** The TomTom does not recognize curly quotes.
• Whatever you put in quotes is what will appear on the TomTom screen. I’ve found it best to limit the descriptions to 50 characters.
• You’ll read that you can put phone numbers in POIs. The way to do that is to include the phone number in the “Description” field in quotes; there is no separate field for phone number. There are just three fields to a POI: longitude, latitude, description.
• Note that longitudes west of the 0° meridian (often called “Greenwich”), need to be preceded by a minus sign. So a longitude of W94 deg, 30 min, 0 sec can be represented as -94.5 deg. Every longitude in North America is west of Greenwich, so they all must begin with minus signs.

According to the readme file that comes with makeov2.exe (a program that converts text files to ov2 format), the long/lat data can be in several formats:

-93.5 , 34 , “Truckers Restaurant La Bamba” *
-953.5000000 , 34.00000000 , “Truckers Restaurant La Bamba”
-93’30″00 , 34’00″00 , “Truckers Restaurant La Bamba”
-93’30 , 34’0 , “Truckers Restaurant La Bamba”
-93:30:0 , 34 , “Truckers Restaurant La Bamba”

* Important: W longitudes begin with a negative sign. Eg, W94.5 degrees needs to be represented as -94.5

When I experimented with the “:” format, though, I had no success. But I do know for a fact that decimal format does work.

If your coordinates are not already in one of those formats, you may have to manually convert them to decimal format.

The last step is to convert the text file to an *.ov2 file, using the application makeov2.exe. An easy way to do this is to put the text file in the same folder as the makeov2.exe application. Then you can drag the text file’s icon file over the makeov2.exe icon. If the text file is in order, makeov2.exe will make an ov2 file out of it and will place it in the same folder. Eg, if you drag a filename.txt icon over the makeov2.exe icon, makeov2.exe will create a file named filename.ov2.

To put the new ov2 into your TomTom, follow the directions given in my previous post:

How to Import POIs into Your TomTom 910

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