MindManager Shortcuts: 2 – using “secret” markers

Posted on 17 April, 2018 by

MindManager is a great program but it has its shortcomings; this 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 →

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MindManager Shortcuts: 1 – selecting topic levels

Posted on 17 March, 2018 by

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 →

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Strong growth in Sociamind visits

Posted on 18 January, 2018 by

While I would like to claim all the credit for the strong growth in the number of site visitors and page views for the Sociamind website in 2017 I suspect that part of the story is an increasing interest in MindManager itself, especially since the 2017 release.

There were 3,190 visitors to the website with 5,929 views, an increase of 21% and 31% respectively over the 2016 figures (2,630 and 4,516). Apart from the Home page, by far the most views were of two articles on the new dashboard map and HTML 5 export features in MM 2017. Geographically, over half the views came from the US, with the UK and Germany running a distant second and third respectively.

Whatever your reasons for visiting Sociamind and regardless of where you come from, I would like to thank all my Sociamind visitors for your continued support.

Posted in Mind Mapping, Software, Statistics | 3 Comments

See Sociamind articles on MindManager organised by category

Posted on 17 January, 2018 by

In addition to the new online map of Sociamind posts on MindManager, all articles relating to MindManager can now be accessed by category. Simply select Posts by Category from the main menu to access the drop-down list.

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Explore MindManager Articles in new Sociamind Map

Posted on 16 January, 2018 by

Almost all MindManager-related posts on Sociamind since early 2014 have been incorporated into a new map, available via the Sociamind menu or here.

The new map also demonstrates the Publish feature which has been further enhanced  with the release of MM 2018. This allows users to publish fully-featured interactive mindmaps hosted on Mindjet’s own servers which are available on most browsers either via a link or embedding in the user’s browser.

The map has been organised into key themes and sub-themes with the MM version used in each original article shown in brackets. Click on the hyperlink icon next to any topic to access the relevant article. Please note that articles which discuss several key MindManager features may appear in the map more than once.

 

The map will be updated and amended over time to incorporate new articles as they are published. Please note however that the material in some articles may not be relevant to later versions of MindManager or the specific commands required may have changed from those described. For this reason no responsibility is taken for the accuracy of the information provided.

Posted in Mind Mapping, Project Management | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Getting On Track with MindManager 2018 – part 2: tracking in sub-project roll-ups

Posted on 10 January, 2018 by

Like my previous post on how to show the degree that tasks in a MindManager project map are “On Track”, this article was prompted by a query on the MindManager Community Forum.

In this case the question was whether it is possible to highlight parent topics based on the specific attributes of sub-tasks; for example, whether any of these sub-tasks are yet to begin, if they are falling behind schedule or whether they have (or don’t have) other characteristics. The answer is a qualified yes – it is possible to show at the parent topic level if one or more of its sub-tasks meet certain criteria, but not how many sub-tasks are involved, nor which ones they are. However even this information can be very useful, especially when a map is collapsed so that individual tasks can’t be seen.

In the following example I’m going to demonstrate how to do this with the On-Track status I discussed in the last post. However, the technique can be used with a range of task information items (for example, progress) as well as with any topic properties created by the user. As with the previous article you will need MindManager 2018 and if you are intending to use On-Track status you will also need the MAP add-in from Olympic Limited and to have set up the On-Track formulae and extended properties using the techniques I described in the previous post. Continue reading →

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Getting On Track with MindManager 2018 – updated

Posted on 22 December, 2017 by

Update: since posting  the first version of this article I discovered that the MAP add-in Extended Properties feature which this approach relies on counts task days differently to MindManager. I’ve developed a workaround which is incorporated into this updated version.

I was prompted to write this article by a query on the Mindjet Community Forum about whether it was possible in MindManager to highlight which tasks in a project are “On Track” – in other words, those tasks in which the proportion of each task completed matches the time elapsed since the task began.

MM actually already has a very simple version of showing lagging tasks in the form of the at-risk and past-due indicators. The at-risk indicator is applied when a task duration is more than 75% elapsed but progress is less than 75%, while the past due indicator appears when the due date has lapsed but the task is incomplete.

Neither of these addresses the broader issue of showing tasks which are either lagging or ahead of schedule at other times – or indeed those tasks which are exactly on track. In my response to the query on the Mindjet forum I provided a brief example of how all this could be done using several new features in MM2018 and critically, a couple of functions in the MM MAP add-in.

In this post I’ll describe in more detail how this approach can be developed and how the resulting information can be displayed in a variety of ways. More broadly this example demonstrates the extent to which the powerful new features in MM2018 and the MAP add-in can be integrated to provide additional tools for information analysis and presentation. Continue reading →

Posted in Mind Mapping, New Version Overviews, Project Management | Tagged , | 1 Comment