Thanks to all of you who responded to this questions. You've definitely given me some good ideas to try. The four responses I've received so far are listed below. Gary. *************** Yannick Leduc offered this idea for circles sized on the number of points at the given location: Hi Gary, this solution will work if your overlapping points are exactly at the same coordinates. First, you need to add as columns the X and Y coordinates to your point table using CentroidX() and CentroidY() Then, perform a query on your table where you will group your data around X and Y coordinates. It should looks something like this: Select Columns: Xcoord, Ycoord, count(*) >From tables: your_point_table Where conditions: Group By: Xcoord, Ycoord Order By: into Table Named: Grouped_points Then, save the query's result into a new table (Save Copy As) and open it Then, create points from X and Y coordinates (Table>Create Points...) Then, create a graduated thematic on the count column. Finally, you should be able to see a circle where the radius is define by the number of occurence at the same location. I'm not fully operational with english. I hope you have what you need! Salutations! Yannick *************** Jason Adam had this idea for creating an individual values theme based upon the categories that occured at the same location (I especially like this idea because it makes labelling at lot easier as well): Gary- I think ideally you would have one row for each location, and multiple columns that would be filled with the data that exists at that point. Then to make the thematic map you'd have one final column where you concatenate all the data together ie category1+category2+category3+.... Then when you make an Individual thematic you could assign the points "category1" as one symbol, "category2" as one symbol, "category1category2" as another, "category1category2category3" as yet another, and so on. Just edit the Legend text to reflect what the codes mean. Good luck, Jason せカせЙせカせЙせカせ Jason Adam Computer Draftsperson Monopros Limited Toronto, ON [EMAIL PROTECTED] *************** Julie Kanzler offered several possible solutions (I like the starburst idea): Gary: I have been in your situation many times because I map a lot of sampling data and monitoring sites. Shifting a sample site is equivalent to falsifying the data! In the past I have generally done one of a few things: 1) used star-like symbols, where the number of prongs refers to the number of samples the symbol represents. 2) used a thematic point map where symbol size represents the number of samples. 3) used a single symbol, but rotated the symbol in place. This is most useful when the rotations can refer to some element of the data. I assigned rotations to points based on the data collection date. The result is that samples collected during different sampling events overlay without obscuring any. This is easier to do in ArcView. 4) used a combination of filled and non-filled symbols. I hope these give you some ideas. If you get a chance, let me know what you end up doing ... maybe I can learn something! Julie Kanzler GIS Analyst/Programmer Wyle Laboratories Arlington, VA (703) 415-4550 ext. 20 *************** Phil Atkinson suggested using continous theme shading which doesn't really work for my situation since we are interested in the exact point locations but may work for other situtations: Gary, We use density estimation to produce a continous density surface using mapbasic. I'll publish the code in 1-2mnths.. Phil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put "unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]