Welcome to the Flightmap guided tour! This page also serves as an online manual for Flightmap.

Itineraries

The files you handle with Flightmap are itineraries, very much like the passenger receipt from your airline ticket. When you start Flightmap, you see an empty itinerary. You can edit the table a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. The exception to this is the "distance" column, which is computed automatically in regard to the IATA airport codes of both previous columns. New rows are automatically added as you edit the last empty row.

To get you going quickly, Flightmap contains a sample itinerary which you can open with the file menu. The file menu can be accessed by clicking on the big button in the upper left corner of the windows (something many users new to the Microsoft Office interface struggle to find out).
The sample itinerary contains five different flights. You can now select multiple rows, and can edit all marked rows at once using the controls in the "Modify" chunk of the ribbon. The comboboxes "To" and "From" also give you access to the airport database in case you cannot recall a specific code.
If you have a connecting flight, or especially if you are a crew member, you fly multiple legs on the same day, the same carrier, and probably the same class too. The "Route" button in the "Add" chunk of the ribbon opens a dialog where you can enter a connecting route. Please note that these flights get marked as "Frequent Flyer award":
This adds multiple flights to your itinerary, all with the same settings in the other columns. Note that the distances are computed automatically. The sample itinerary contains 7 flights now, with the last two being marked as award flights.

Using Flightmap

At the right end of the ribbon, you can see a tab names HEL, with the word airport and some fancy color above it. This tab shows information regarding the airport that is just selected in the itinerary – and only if an airport is selected there. Clicking on the tab will show the country, name and geographic location of the airport with the IATA code HEL:

Another context-sensitive tab is available if you select an airline in the itinerary. Depending on the airline, you can open both the website and Wikipedia entry of the airline, their frequent flyer program, and the airline's alliance:
Flightmap contains information about all airlines that are members of the three large alliances "Star Alliance", "SkyTeam" and "oneworld". When editing your itinerary, you can easily select the airline (and also the airports and equipment used) from the ribbon. Things that are already in your itinerary are always shown on top:
You can configure the items in the status bar by clicking on it with the right mouse button. A context menu pops up that lets you turn the six controls of the status bar on or off:
Clicking on the table with the right mouse button also opens a context menu. This menu contains all the controls from the "Clipboard" and the "Flights" chunk in the ribbon:
You can save your itinerary in multiple file formats: .air is the native file format of Flightmap, which you can also link to the executable file using the "Options" dialog from the file menu. Other options include .csv (comma separated values) and plain text.
CSV files (comma separated values) are suitable for Microsoft Excel. Just open the file, and Excel pops up with a basic spreadsheet:

Statistics

Handling itineraries is nice, but it doesn't get you too far – so here comes the fancy stuff! For a start, the "Statistics" tab in the ribbon gives you access to some very powerful functionality. Before actually doing anything, you can select if you'd like inbound and outbound routes (e.g. DUS-FRA and FRA-DUS) to be treated as identical, or as actually two different routes. You can also select if you'd like award flights to be treated as separate non-revenue booking classes, or if they should be merged with your regular Y/J/F flights, leaving Crew/DCM the only item in the non-revenue category. The same applies to Economy and Premium Economy class.

The summary window counts all your flights in regard to your configuration and to different categories, like airports or airlines:
Next, you can set a "drilldown filter". You may select any airline, airport, equipment or class your itinerary contains. Here, we choose "Airbus A340" as equipment:
You can do two things with this filter: first, you can open the statistics window as "filtered summary"). This time, it will only contain the flights that match your filter settings. That's a very useful feature, e.g. if you'd like to find out what's your top airport on a certain airline, or how many miles you've done on this specific kind of equipment:
Second, you can just select all the flights in the itinerary that match the filter. That's very useful in combination with maps, as you'll learn in the next picture section:

Maps

When you use Flightmap, the main reason are probably the maps. The map tab of the ribbon contains all the tools you need. You can choose to display all flights or only those you've previously selected in the itinerary – either manually, or through the filter described above. This allows you to include only certain flights in the map, e.g. on a certain carrier or equipment.

Most importantly, you can set a resolution for the resulting image. You can pick one from a list of very common resolutions, including screen, TV and HDTV sizes.
You can choose between four different backgrounds: an abstract world map, a daytime map (used throughout this tour), a night map (called "City lights") and a solid colored background for schematics.
Then all you have to do is hit the "Map preview" button to open a new window with your map. You can open multiple preview windows at the same time. If the map is larger than the window, you can scroll in both directions.
The "Fit to window" button will display the map image according to the window's size. The actual resolution of the image is not changed, however.
Once you're satisfied, yousave the map to a file in one of four different formats. Beware that .jpg is a lossy format, so for posters and high quality video production you should choose either .bmp, .png or .tif as file format. They use lossless compression (i.e. there is no difference to the original). You can also print the map image, or copy it to the clipboard.
You can also save the map directly without opening the preview window by clicking on the "Save map" button in the main window:

Google Earth

Flightmap can also export your itinerary to Google Earth, creating stunning images of your flight paths. As all flight paths are displayed around the Google Earth globe, the controls in the "Google Earth" tab are much simpler than the ones in the map tab. Just click "Save as" to store your itinerary in a .kml file:

KML files are map overlays for Google Earth. Just open the file, and Google Earth pops up with the flight paths from your itinerary:

Other stuff

In addition to handling itineraries and generating maps, Flightmap offers some more perks: you can calculate the Great Circle distance between any two airports of your itinerary. This is useful when (as one example) you're trying to find out how much longer your connecting flights through a hub airport were compared to the direct route.

The airport finder displays the country, name and location of any airport given by its IATA code. You can also copy this data to the clipboard.
If you click on the small arrow at the bottom right of the chunk, a new window ("Great Circle distance") that combines both opens. You can enter two airports, and also copy the distance data to the clipboard.
For all airliner geeks, Flightmap offers to show all information regarding a flight at a glance, and to store more information for each flight than directly visible in the itinerary: the aircraft registration and the name of the particular aircraft. Both are displayed in the status bar for the currently selected flight:
If you are visually impaired or have a display with a very high resolution, the variable font size of the itinerary will come in handy: