Someone below asked for a tutorial, so here it is.
Google Earth (GE) provides a (free) map of the planet, which uses actual satellite photos as background, so it’s not really a map, it is one step towards being the real thing. GE provides ways for a user to tailor the data being presented, and a number of tools and aids to make additions to the basic satellite view. Navigating around the world is intuitive and easy to do.
Load GE and on the taskbar click ‘View’ and turn on: Tool bar, Side bar and Status bar.
The most often used ‘tools’ are: pushpins and and lines, (Google calls them paths). You can select pushpins from the toolbar and you can start drawing a line by going to tools and selecting ‘path’.
The pushpins can be for anything you want, and their size and color are easily manipulated while the label (title line) for the pushpin is added. It is also possible to use a pushpin without the pushpin icon so that only the text (the title line) appears on the display. I have never found a useful tutorial, I’ve just winged it, it’s all pretty intuitive.
The lines, or paths, are accessed by clicking on add → path and clicking where you want the line to start and then clicking on the subsequent points along the route you want to have displayed. Again there are a lot of variations available: color, width, opacity, and there are text fields to add notes.
I always keep the sidebar turned on and minimized, that gives me access to the GE database, both the part that comes with GE, and the stuff the user creates; Google calls the database ‘Places’ the stuff the user creates is called ‘myplaces’ the stuff Google provides is called ‘layers’. I find Google’s ‘Borders and labels and ‘Places’ to be cluttered, so I keep them turned off unless I’m looking for something they might have. I prefer to just use my ‘myplaces’ data most of the time, I turn on ‘roads’ when needed, Google did a good job with that.
Here are a few links to some of the ‘places’ I have created for Ukraine:
Ukraine.KML www.dropbox.com/… This is the catch all for events in Ukraine
Eastern Europe.kmz www.dropbox.com/… Self explanatory
Ukraine History.kmz www.dropbox.com/… A few historical locations that I may expand in the future
NATO.kmz www.dropbox.com/… A place for NATO stuff with just a few entries. Cacusus.kmz www.dropbox.com/…
Africa.kmz www.dropbox.com/...
If you have GE installed, you can just click on any of these files and GE will start up and load them, click on them all and you have everything. Then tell GE to save myplaces and you have your own copies that you can add to or edit any way you want.