My current best practice to get Garmin GPS tracks into Google Earth

Even though I purchased the Plus version of Google Earth, I have not been able to import tracks directly from my Garmin GPSmap 296. Some of my previous posts have discussed how to get the tracks imported, but recently Dave posted a comment that pointed me to a better way. Here's the summary of how I create Google Earth (GE) files from my flight tracks (I assume you have the newest version of the free GE installed):
  1. Using the newest version of MapSource, import the tracks from your GPS into a new MapSource file/doc
  2. In MapSource (on the tracks tab) delete all the tracks you don't want to see in GE (the flight tracks are typically the ones with lots of points in them, but you can view the tracks by date/time too)
  3. Now for the great tip from Dave: go to the view menu in MapSource and choose "View in Google Earth"
  4. Google Earth will start and will now have everything from your MapSource document in the "Temporary Places" folder
  5. In that folder will be "GPS device" and underneath that: Tracks. You can right-click on each track and choose "edit" to change how the track is drawn. I like to remove the icons by deleting the "root://...." text and, under the location tab in the edit page, I like to make the altitudes "absolute" with the "extrude geometry vertically" checkbox on

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