Several friends and I are trying to write a self-published travel
guide book which will include many street maps and tourist
destinations.

Because custom cartography artwork is time-consuming, expensive, and
difficult to update, we were wondering if GIS cartography software had
advanced to the point where it was a viable alternative to
artist/craftsman cartography?

Ideally, we'd like to create an Excel spreadsheet (or etc.) containing
tourist destinations and addresses, and have them be rendered over a
high-quality, high-resolution street map, which we could include in
our guide book.  If we need to change the destinations, we only would
need to change the spreadsheet and re-render the map.

I have used a few inexpensive consumer mapping apps (such as DeLorme
Street Atlas), which does allow you to overlay destinations, but the
graphical presentation is very ugly.  Streets are jagged, fonts
difficult to read, etc.  I think such a program would be quite close
to what we need, if it had better quality output.

QUESTION: Can you summarize the existing commercial software packages
that can generate publication-quality, high-resolution street maps,
with overlays of symbols and text at proper geographic locations?