MindManager 2017’s new features in action – 2: dashboard maps (2017.1 update)

Posted on 17 January, 2017 by Alex

It seems that MindManager 2017 is a work in progress. Normally Mindjet makes incremental changes between major upgrades – and these are sometimes as much about taking out features, or fixing problems with previous additions as they are about adding anything new – but this approach has been upended with the release of the latest update, MindManager 2017.1 ( which I’ll refer to as MM 2017.1).

MindManager 2017 was a fairly substantial upgrade in its own right and apart from Mindjet’s commitment to continue making improvements to its new HTML export feature there was little to indicate that the first point upgrade would do more than tidy up a few loose ends. I was surprised therefore to see that the release notes for MM 2017.1 contained a whole page of updated features.

By far the most significant of these is the new dashboard map facility which Mindjet has slipped into the standard as well as the enterprise version of MM 2017.1 with little fanfare. For the first time, users can create a single map which can pull together and summarise data from a range of other maps and, most significant of all, keep this rolled-up information up-to-date. Continue reading →

Posted in Mind Mapping, New Version Overviews, Project Management, Statistics | Tagged , | 5 Comments

MindManager 2017’s new features in action – 1: HTML 5 export

Posted on 10 January, 2017 by Alex

A Happy New Year to all Sociamind readers and welcome to the first post of 2017.

What is HTML 5 export and what does it do?

While MindManager 2017 (MM 2017) did not give users everything they wanted, it did deliver a number of unexpected but mostly pleasant surprises. In this occasional series I’ll explore some of these new features, both major and minor, and provide examples of how to use them in interesting ways.

My first example is the HTML 5 export facility which allows users to export a mindmap as a web page. These maps do not require MM and in fact can be accessed by anyone with a browser. With the latest 17.1.167 update they can also use a number of layouts and are fully interactive, allowing users to expand and collapse branches and click on hyperlinks and attachments. Most aspects of mind maps including features such as topic notes are also retained in the export process. The HTML 5 export also replaces the previous somewhat unreliable interactive PDF export feature. Continue reading →

Posted in Export, Mind Mapping, New Version Overviews, Software | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

MindManager 2017 “sneak peeks” summarised: what we now know about the new version

Posted on 30 September, 2016 by Alex

Following on from the MindManager for Windows 2017 preview which I discussed in a recent post, Mindjet has just completed a series of five sneak peeks looking at some of the key features of the new version. These demonstrate a strong emphasis on extending Mindjet’s capabilities in relation to presentation, integration with other software and project management, but they also raise some tantalising questions about how far these new features actually will go. Here are the key links:

MindManager 2017 newtimeline feature. Source: Mindjet

MindManager 2017 new timeline feature. Source: Mindjet

I won’t go over the material in these sneak peeks in detail but I thought I’d provide a quick summary and offer some observations.

Continue reading →

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

Update: Good news on Google searching in MindManager

Posted on 20 September, 2016 by Alex

In my last post I described some work-arounds to cope with the recent and sudden demise of MindManager’s Google search map part, due to changes in the Google search API. The map part allowed users to undertake Google searches within MindManager (MM) and was particularly useful for researchers.

In light of Mindjet’s announcement that a replacement would not be available for at least another year I was trying to identify some alternative approaches – though none of the ones I suggested were as straightforward or effective as the original map part. Not being a programmer I also assumed that designing an add-in to replace it would be very complex.

Happily I was wrong. Nigel Goult from Olympic Limited took up the challenge and has created an add-in which effectively replicates the map part and adds some extra features. This is available in two flavours – as a stand-alone add-in called Google Search Plus and as part of the latest 2.3 version of MAP for MindManager – a handy collection of nearly 50 tools you can use with MM. Continue reading →

Posted in Mind Mapping, Research and Writing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Web searching in MindManager without the Google search map part

Posted on 14 August, 2016 by Alex

Why was the Google map search part so useful…

For those of us who use MindManager (MM) for research purposes, the sudden demise of the program’s Google map search part has left a serious gap. It was also one of MM’s more under-recognised features so it probably needs a little explanation.

The part was a modest but very useful tool for seeking out and storing relevant web-based material within a mindmap. With the map part, users could create and save simple Google searches which could be saved in the map and run at any time. The results generated, including live links, also appeared in the map; they were regenerated whenever the search was run, but could also be saved permanently.

Google map search part example

Example of a search with the now defunct Google map search part

Continue reading →

Posted in Mind Mapping, Research and Writing, Software | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Mindjet releases preview of MindManager 2017

Posted on 20 July, 2016 by Alex

The following is a copy of post that I recently made on the MindManager Forum regarding the features of the next version of MindManager 2017, to be released later this year.

Mindjet have just released a “preview” of MindManager 2017 due to be released in September this year which highlights the following features (my comments in brackets):

  • HTML5 export of interactive maps which can be opened in most browsers (presumably an expanded and updated version of the current very basic web export facility);
MM17 1

Example screen shot of MindManager 2017 (source: Mindjet)

  • Export map content to “over 700 leading cloud apps” like Slack, Box, OneNote, Google Docs, and Gmail through Zapier (as I understood that this is already available through MindManager Enterprise, I assume this means this facility is being extended to the standard version. I assume this will address the current lack of OneNote integration which a number of users have been seeking);
  • The ability to transfer Gmail items and send content and status updates into maps as topics using Zapier (fortunately, it appears from the screenshots that MM can still communicate directly with Outlook);
  • New horizontal and vertical timeline templates which can be filtered (this is a feature which users have called for several years and which is increasingly available on competing products);

Continue reading →

Posted in Mind Mapping | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The Ins and Outs of MindManager Word Importing – Part C: Task Lists

Posted on 21 April, 2016 by Alex

This is the third in a series about importing Word documents into MindManager (MM), relying in part on the program’s ability to recognise its own Word formatting to recognise specialised fields. In the first part I covered how to import paragraph-based documents while using the heading structure to generate the topic hierarchy of the resulting mind map, while in part B I discussed table and spreadsheet importing from Word and Excel. In this part I’m applying on some of the techniques to import a more specialised table type – task lists. Continue reading →

Posted in Import, Mind Mapping, Software | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The Ins and Outs of MindManager Word Importing – Part B: tables

Posted on 12 April, 2016 by Alex

This is the second in a series about importing Word documents into MindManager (MM). In the first part I looked at the options for importing paragraph-based documents and retaining the heading structure in the topic hierarchy of the resulting mind map. In this part I’ll discuss how to import various types of tables from Word and also Excel.

This is something I first looked at in a post five years ago which in turn drew on the work of Andrew Wilcox who discovered that just as in a document structured with paragraphs, a Word table to which Word heading styles have been applied will develop an appropriate topic hierarchy when imported to MM – though there are some catches. In a more recent post I also looked at the use of Excel pivot tables to assist in the importing process.

In this post I’ll try to bring together and update these different approaches and also introduce some other ideas – including a surprisingly simple one which makes table importing a lot easier. Continue reading →

Posted in Import, Mind Mapping, Software | Tagged , | 5 Comments

The ins and outs of MindManager Word importing – part A: standard Word documents

Posted on 21 March, 2016 by Alex

Background

In my last post I discussed in detail a process I have developed to import a task list from Word into MindManager (MM). This process uses a unique feature of MM – when it sends a document the other way to Word, it applies its own versions of the Word’s formatting style as found in the Word template the user nominates for the export process. These include the equivalent of Word heading styles, but also some quite specialised ones as well.

One response I received commented that the post was hard to follow because I spent a lot of time explaining the background context on top of describing a fairly complex process. It was suggested that I perhaps could write another post, or series of posts, concentrating on and clarifying the steps involved.

Around the same time I responded to a question on the MM forum on how to import Word documents with hyperlinks appearing in the topics. This isn’t possible, but documents can be imported so that standalone hyperlinks display correctly in MM – ie, as hyperlink icons next to the topics by again using MM’s Word style formatting. I indicated that I would write the process up in more detail on this blog.

I’ve decided to combine these ideas into a series of three or four posts on using MM Word styles to assist in importing a range of Word documents. In this first post I’ll deal with importing “conventional” Word documents, in the second I’ll cover importing Word tables (updating some older articles I wrote coving this) and in last one or two I’ll revisit my recent post on the more complex task of importing task lists. Continue reading →

Posted in Import, Mind Mapping, Software | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Sending tasks from Word to MindManager (with a little help from Excel)

Posted on 23 February, 2016 by Alex

Update: I have published an updated and simplified method for importing task lists from Word which does not rely on splitting the table into rows as described in the post below. This is Part C of a series of articles on importing from Word and should be read in conjunction with Part B which covers importing non-task tables. Part A looks at the importing of standard non-table text from Word.

1. Introduction

Recently I posted a series of three articles that discussed how to use MindManager’s Gantt table to export a user-friendly to-do list with task data from MindManager to either Excel or Word, noting that despite its numerous export options the program lacked a facility to produce such a simple list easily (yes, exporting to Excel does produce a list but if you have a multi-layered map the tasks will spread across several columns which is difficult to read and time-consuming to turn into something more user-friendly).

The opposite – importing a task list complete with this task information created in either these programs direct into MindManager (MM) – is even more difficult. While MM will happily import a Word document with the appropriate heading structure or (albeit a bit more grudgingly) a table, in both cases it either ignores the task information or imports it rather uselessly as sub-topics or topic notes. Continue reading →

Posted in Import, Mind Mapping | Tagged , | 1 Comment