February 26, 2007, Toronto, Canada, NAC Geographic Products Inc. announced the release of the NAC Smart Tag DLL for Microsoft Office - an integration of the Natural Area Coding System with Microsoft Smart Tag technology.
Smart tags enable real-time, dynamic recognition of content and offer relevant options to people as they work to allow them to quickly access and analyze information. Microsoft has already included the smart tags for Financial Symbol, Address, Place, Date, Telephone Number, Time and Personal Name in its Office suite including Outlook email software.
Although Microsoft’s Address and Place smart tags can correctly recognize most US addresses, they are not able to handle international addresses, not mention addresses in other languages and characters and locations without addresses.
Therefore, a smart tag for any area or any location in the world is urgently demanded. NAC Smart Tag is exactly such a tag based on a Natural Area Code (NAC) which always starts with "NAC: " followed by two character strings separated by one blank space. NAC is highly efficient which can specify an area about 1000km X 670km anywhere in the world with two characters, 35km X 23km with four characters, a square kilometer (1200m X 750m) with six characters, a building size area (40m X 25m) with eight characters and a square meter (1.3m X 0.8m) with ten characters. It is also language independent and covers all locations and areas in the world.
"Before the introduction of NAC Smart Tag, due to the lack of universal smart tags for all locations and areas in the world, referencing an accurate location is very inconvenient and therefore rarely seen in Office documents. But now with the help of NAC Smart Tag, referencing accurate locations and areas becomes so simple that people type the NACs of accurate locations in any Office document which will automatically turn them into smart tags highlighted with either underlined red dots or a colored cell corner," said Dr. Xinhang Shen, president of NAC Geographic Products Inc., "readers can simply click a smart tag to get the high resolution satellite image showing its exact location without the help of other software." Here is an example of a NAC Smart Tag:
NAC: 8KDB PGFD
If you have installed the NAC Smart Tag DLL on your computer, moving the cursor on it will pop up its action menu and you can click it to get the map of the NAC immediately.
Because of the convenience of using NAC Smart Tag to specify any accurate location or area in the world, police officers, journalists and other authors can include NACs in their reports or emails so that readers of the documents can conveniently get the maps of the exact locations whenever they want. All salespersons can store the NACs of their customers in an Excel spreadsheet or an Access table which can be used as an efficient tool to map any customer location on the list without the support of any GIS software.
NAC Smart Tags in Office documents can even be saved with the contents in web pages which can be directly published on the Internet to significantly reduce the work of referencing accurate locations for location sensitive stories. Search engines can even use the NACs to sort stories according to their locations.
People may say "Yes, NAC Smart Tag is amazing, but where can we get it for a given location?" If you have a NAC enhanced GPS receiver (GPS cepphones, GPS watches, GPS cameras, etc) such as Locamagic, you can simply click a button to get the NAC of your current location instantly. If you don't have such a device, you can also get it on NAC Lookup Service or NAC Enhanced Google Maps. You can even get the NACs of a list of street addresses in 24 countries through a batch geocoding service from NAC Geographic Products Inc. That means that everybody can use NAC Smart Tag and enjoy its convenience right now.
The FREE NAC Smart Tag turns Microsoft Office into powerful and easy-to-use GIS software for general users.
About NAC Geographic Products Inc.
Incorporated in 1995 in Toronto, Canada, NAC Geographic Products Inc. is a world's leading company in geographic information technologies. In addition to the Natural Area Coding System, the company also develops a variety of software applications and provides NAC Real-Time Geo-Services (geocoding, reverse-geocoding, mapping, driving directions, nearby business searching and traffic information) for web applications and wireless location based services through Locamagic.biz and MLBS.NET.
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