I like to plan biking routes while flying to destinations and am wondering if there’s any way to use Microsoft Maps on my Windows 10 laptop even though I’m offline at the time?
Computers have gone through a curious evolution, starting out with “dumb” terminals that required a hardwired connection to a central computer to “smart” devices that could do everything autonomously to “cloud” systems that relied on an always-on connection to the remote data servers somewhere else on the Internet. The latest step in this back and forth journey are cloud-based services that now offer support for offline work. Services like Google Docs and a lot of Microsoft tools that are include with the latest and greatest version of MS Windows – Windows 10.
What’s great about how Win10 has implemented offline maps, however, is that it works exactly as you would want: you can download just those areas of the world you want, and every time you connect to the Internet on Wi-Fi, Windows will automatically download any map updates for those specific maps to keep you working with the very latest map and location data. Done with a region? It’s easy to get rid of maps for areas you aren’t planning on visiting to save disk space. Let’s have a look!
To start out, the Maps application in Windows 10. You’ve seen it before:
Look closely: there are buttons all over this interface, rather confusingly. They range from the search box to the Windows Ink button on the top right that lets you scribble on an “overlay” to the map to the “+” and “-” buttons that let you zoom in and out to find exactly the spot you seek. The particular button we want, however, is the “•••” button on the top right.
A click on “•••” and you’ll get a small menu of options to pop up:
Choose “Settings” and you’ll see, it’s pretty easy to see how to proceed:
There are some other interesting settings here, but click on “Choose maps” under Offline maps and you’ll launch a Control Panel, of all things:
As you might imagine, it’s pretty straightforward from this point. Click on the “+” symbol adjacent to “Download maps” and you’ll get a hierarchical list of continents:
I’ll grab a map of Montana and another of Colorado while I’m here, which is done by choosing “North and Central America“…
It’s as easy as a click or two and they’re queued up – along with a map of England so I can explore London offline too:
Once I get onto a public (e.g., free) wifi network, it starts zooming along, though Colorado needs a kick in the download to work:
Once it’s done you can now explore those areas without being online, though there’s really no visible indicator that it’s working as you can see in this map of Bozeman, Montana in Microsoft Maps:
The only way to really tell if it’s working is to disconnect from every network and try moving around and zooming in to get specific details of an area. If it works, you’re good and it’s working off the downloaded offline map. If it complains, well, you might need to double check that the download worked and restart Maps or even your PC to get everything just so.
That should definitely get you going with offline downloaded maps for Microsoft Maps. Have fun biking!