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In this the third in an occasional series of articles on MindManager shortcuts I’m describing how to use conditional formatting as a more user-friendly alternative to power filters. Many of these posts are based on solutions I’ve suggested in response to questions on the Mindjet community forum. In part 1 I described how to select topics by level, while in the last post I explored options to set up and use “secret” markers.

Update: When I was responding to some thoughtful comments on the original post I realised that I had forgotten to highlight the most important advantage of Conditional Formatting over the Power Filter: its much better handling of the distinction between filtering topics that match all the query criteria and filtering topics that match any of the search criteria. I have therefore rewritten and expanded this post with some examples. The table has been updated as well.

MindManager’s Power Filter is quite a powerful facility, giving users the ability to set up queries based on almost every aspect of a map. Multiple queries can also be created, saved and applied cumulatively, while the ability to fade filtered topics as well as to show and hide them is a great recent addition. However, power filters can be tricky to use and the feature’s interface does not make it easy to set up complex queries.

A prime example is the way in which the Power Filter handles the choice between “Any Element” – when you are looking for topics that meet any of the criteria, and “All Elements” –when you want to show only the topics that meet all criteria. You see these choices only on some tabs: the Markers tab in the Power Filters dialogue box where there is an Any marker/All marker choice, on the Text and Other Elements tab where the options are Any element/All elements and on the Properties tab where the choice is Any property/All properties.

However, these Any/All options apply only to the items within each tab. For example, if on the Markers tab you can select, for example, Priority 1 and another marker such as, say, a green flag and then choose either Any marker or All markers, the query will return the results you expect. On the other hand, if you select Priority 1 from the Markers tab and a Due date of today from the Task Info tab, the resulting query will show all tasks that suit either criteria, regardless of the Any marker/All markers setting. Continue reading →

MindManager is a great program but it has its shortcomings; this is the second in an occasional series of articles on how to overcome some of these. Many of these posts are based on solutions I’ve suggested in response to questions on the Mindjet community forum. In part 1 I described how to select topics by level, while in this post I’m looking at how to set up and use “secret” markers.

MindManager has a wealth of features including a comprehensive set of icons, flags and markers which can be added to topics. It also provides a facility to hide these icons altogether while still making them available as filterable objects.

This is handy if you want to reduce visual clutter in a map, for example when you want to print it. However, it is an all-or-nothing feature which can’t be applied just to selected icons; they are either all visible or invisible (the same limitation also applies to text tags). This means that there is no opportunity to set up specific individual markers, or groups of markers, which can be hidden while others remain on show.

There are lots of ways in which a facility to set up selected “secret” markers would be useful. You might want to distinguish otherwise-unrelated special tasks that you want to keep an eye on without making this obvious, or your map may have topics which share a specific feature that needs to be recognised but which can be ignored most of the time. Secret markers can also be helpful as a way of marking topics in very large maps that you need to find quickly without adding to the map’s overall clutter.

Secret Marker Options

Fortunately there are a couple of ways to achieve this, based on a couple of lesser-known MM features which can be repurposed as secret markers – assuming that you aren’t planning on using these features for their original purpose: Continue reading →

MindManager is an incredibly versatile and useful program but it has its shortcomings, so I thought I’d start an occasional series of articles on how to overcome some of these. Many of these posts are based on solutions I’ve suggested in response to questions on the Mindjet community forum. Welcome to the first in the series, on selecting topics by level.

One of the puzzling aspects of MindManager is the lack of any provision to select topics automatically at the same level across branches. Apart from Main Topics (which I will come to in moment), MM does not appear to offer an easy way to do this – or at least none that I can find.

MM obviously “knows” about its own topic levels – it automatically allocates the appropriate level whenever you add a topic or sub-topic. In addition it also matches the topic level to the relevant heading or paragraph style based on the template used when a map is exported to Word; this information is also available to third-party add-ins.

However MM does not extend this facility to end users, despite the many other selection options provided. Topic level selection is not provided as an option for filtering or searching, nor can it be used as a trigger in conditional formatting or as a range in formulas. The only “official” ways to select topics (besides Main Topics) at the same level manually are using the shift or control keys, or highlighting them with the mouse.

This is frustrating as there are many situations in which the ability to select by topic level throughout a map would be very useful, for example, if you want to quickly change the appearance of a whole layer of topics or to add an icon or tag to them. It would also be helpful to be able to specify topic levels in formulas, so that you could sum or average a numeric topic property at the same level across branches.

I don’t know why MindManager’s creators have made this so difficult, but I can suggest a couple of workarounds to make topic level selectable. The first one which applies only to Main Topics is more of a neglected command than a workaround, while the second can be easily applied at any topic level but requires the use of an add-in. Continue reading →