In this occasional series I’m looking at some of the gaps in MindManager’s extensive feature set and describing a few “tricks”, or workarounds, to deal with them.
In MindManager Gaps and Tricks 2 I described how to import a table of websites from either Word or Excel using the Excel import facility in MindManager 22 which now recognises hyperlinks. The Excel Data Mapper at the core of this feature has been improved and offers the best option for importing Word tables, especially those with hyperlinks.
However, this still leaves open the question of how best to import non-tabular data in Word files containing hyperlinks as well as other topic and task attributes, such as research summaries with hyperlinks to relevant papers and publications, task lists and schedules, catalogues and interview transcripts. There is no equivalent in MindManager (MM) for the Excel Data Mapper, or any other way to control the import process for these documents. Instead, the import process relies on MindManager’s ability to recognise Word paragraph heading styles and to use these as the basis for the map hierarchy. Everything else, including hyperlinks, usually ends up being incorporated into topic notes.
How to import and map documents containing the equivalent of task or topic attributes is the topic of this post – or more accurately, how to do this since significant changes were made to the Word import and export facilities in MindManager 21 and 22. Previously I had posted instructions using undocumented features in earlier versions of MM, but at first I feared that this feature appeared to have been broken by the recent changes. Fortunately all was not lost; as a response on the MindManager Community Forum helpfully pointed out, only a minor tweak is required with these and subsequent versions to use this undocumented feature.
In this post I’ll draw on my previous descriptions of the process and outline how to make it work specifically with MM 21 and 22, and also identify which topic and task attributes and other information can be imported successfully as shown in the example below – and those that don’t work so well, or not at all. And a word of advice; to use this tip you will need a reasonable understanding of either MM21 or 22, as well as experience in using Word and in particular Word templates and paragraph styles. In addition, this process relies on undocumented MindManager features which may be changed or withdrawn at any time.