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I’ve been exploring the process I described in my last post to produce simple to-do lists or task tables from MindManager maps by copying the Gantt chart table and then pasting it in Excel or Word. But first, a clarification in relation to that process – if you want the main and intermediate level topics in the map to appear in these task lists, they have to be visible in the Gantt chart table. This means that either they have to be formatted as tasks or, preferably, that the task information is rolled up to them or through them to the central topic.

Now to describe some of the extra techniques and ideas I’ve come up with in relation to the process (again, based on MindManager 16 but mostly applicable to all recent versions):

Filtering to produce tailored lists. You can filter the map and then click on the Show Filter in Gantt Chart button to mirror the results in the Gantt chart table before copying it to Word or Excel. As well as the start and due dates, task progress or resources which are displayed in the Gantt chart you can also filter on things which don’t appear there, like task priority. This approach would be particularly useful for printing tailored daily task lists for individual staff members involved in major projects, especially those working in situations where they don’t have access to MindManager or to electronic task lists on computers, smartphones or tablets.

Producing an itemised shopping or equipment list. As noted above, one limitation of using the Gantt chart table is that it displays only those topics in the map which incorporate task information. It also does not display topic notes. This means that if you want to include, say, a shopping list or itemised inventory of equipment, these also have to be turned into tasks. The problem is that doing this can distort task info rollup process and it also make it difficult to distinguish the list from the rest of the “real” tasks.

A partial solution is to turn these items into tasks but make them only one minute each in duration. To distinguish them from actual tasks you could also put a dash or similar character at the start of each list item (see following examples).

The table containing these list items can be pasted in Word without any problem but to avoid an error message in Excel (which assumes these characters are mathematical symbols) the first column of the portion of the spreadsheet where you are pasting the table should be formatted as text rather than general. The following shows the table in Word:

Combining the Gantt table copying approach with MindManager exporting/sharing. While I devised the Gantt-based method mainly to produce simple task lists, the results do reflect the limited number of items shown in the Gantt table. While this is quite adequate for most purposes there are times when it would be useful to be able to include some of the omitted items such as priority, duration, effort or topic properties. In addition when exporting to Excel the Start and Due Date columns are in text rather than date format and need to be converted if any date-based calculations are needed.

If the map is relatively flat you can simply use the export to CSV facility which incorporates most of these items and edit the resulting file in Excel. If however you have a lot of tasks at different levels which you want to appear in a single list but still also include items such as priority, duration or date formatting without doing too much editing you can combine the simple task list approach with the standard export process. This involves the following steps:

1. Export a CSV file from MindManager after filtering the map if required. Select Outline in the Export to Spreadsheet (CSV) Settings.

2. Open the file in Excel and insert a column to the left of the exported table. If you have list items in the Gantt table which are preceded by a dash or other mathematical symbol format the column you have just inserted in the Excel spreadsheet as text (it’s probably wise to save the file at this point). The spreadsheet should look something like this:

3. Return to MindManager, open up the Gantt table and select the range of topics and tasks you wish to copy using the process described in the last post. Ensure however that you highlight and copy only the first column.

4. Switch back to Excel and paste the copied set of topics and tasks in the blank column you inserted in step 2. It should be easy to check against the previously-exported table whether the topics and tasks line up appropriately:

5. Once you have the first column correctly positioned, delete all the columns relating to the different map levels that came in the table imported from MindManager. The single column that was pasted in the preceding step should now be immediately to the left of the Progress and other task information-related columns. The table should now look like this, with the Start and Due Date columns automatically formatted as dates:

6. Edit and format the file as required and save again. If you want the file to appear as a Word table, follow these steps in Excel then copy the table to Word.

Creating an alternative “hybrid” view of the Gantt chart. The process of creating and printing the Gantt view in a MindManager map has very limited options and it is difficult to get the results to look the way you want. Simply taking and printing a snip of the Gantt page can sometimes produce better results but in some respects has even more limitations.

One alternative is to create a hybrid view incorporating the text list view with a snip of just the Gantt chart itself. This requires a degree of trial and error, but also has the advantage that the text in the table can be formatted and both this table and the Gantt image resized independently of each other. To do this requires the following steps:

1. Set up a page in Word with the margins and orientation you want – most likely, landscape with narrow margins – and then insert a single row table with only two cells.
2. Go to the map in MindManager and copy the Gantt chart table (or the relevant section of the table), then return to Word and paste it in the first cell. If possible limit the amount pasted so that it can stay on one page.
3. Using the techniques described previously convert the pasted material to a table, so effectively you have a table within a table.
4. Return to the map and take a snip of the relevant section of the chart (without the table). Make sure the range in the chart being copied exactly matches the range in the Gantt chart table copied in step 2.
5. Paste the resulting image in the second cell of the table. The you will need to resize the image and experiment with the size of the text, the width of the cells etc until the topics and tasks in the table align with the Gantt chart bars.
6. Format the table as you see fit and if you wish add a heading. The result should look something like this:

While there are numerous options for exporting MindManager maps to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other destinations, one thing the program lacks is an easy way to print or export a simple table or to-do list of tasks with just four or five columns – a column combining main topics and tasks for example, and one each for start and due dates, and duration and progress.

This is a particular problem if you want to create such a list based on a complex map. If you have a fairly “flat” map with not too many main tasks or rollups and with all the tasks at the same topic level, then exporting to Excel and creating such a task list is reasonably straightforward. If however you have a map with multiple levels and rollups and in particular with tasks occurring at different levels, things can get very messy.

I’ve created this hypothetical party planning map to demonstrate some of the issues involved and how they may be resolved (I’m using MindManager 16 for this but the problem and approach should be similar for all recent versions):

When this map is exported to Excel with the task information included it ends up looking like this:

While the task info such as start and due dates all end up in the same column, the main topics appear in the first column separate from the tasks themselves which are distributed across the columns representing the three different levels in the map.

This obviously makes sense for a lot of purposes but is not ideal for a simple task list. You can try to collapse the multiple columns with the actual tasks and main topics into a single column, but doing so by simply moving tasks to the first column can result in the task info getting out of whack. I’m sure a macro could be created in Excel to automate this process while maintaining the task information columns, but not everyone can write macros.

Exporting to Word with the task information results in something which looks even more divorced from a simple task list. The tasks appear as headings at various levels and the task info as one-row tables under the task heading they refer to, as the following document exported from the above map demonstrates:

Again it may be possible to turn this into a simple list but this seems to require even more work than converting the Excel file, so I started to look at alternatives. My first point of call was the Outline view, but this does not include any task information. There is however another starting point, which already looks very much like the task list I want; the summary table of tasks and task information in the Gantt view, as shown in this snip of the Gantt chart from the party planning map:

While this is close in format to the list I want, how you export it isn’t immediately obvious though it is relatively simple. All you need to do is maximise the Gantt chart so that all of the section you want of the Gantt table is visible (I’ll come back to this in a moment), highlight all the topics and subtopics you want to appear as well as the columns you need and then copy them.

There are however a couple of catches. The most important is that the selecting, highlighting and copying must be done in the Gantt chart table and not on the map itself. If you highlight topics in the map view a similar area will also be highlighted in the Gantt view, but if you click in the Gantt table area to copy it, only the information relating to the final topic will actually be copied. In addition there is no point in right-clicking after selecting the area in the Gantt table to be copied, as the context menu does not include the copy command; you have to use either the copy command in the ribbon or its equivalent in the QAT:

Once you have copied the portion of the Gantt table you want, simply switch to Excel or Word and paste it. In Excel the material copied will appear as a simple table with all the topics and tasks included in a single column. You will need to widen the columns after which you can format the new table as you wish, though remember that the dates appear as text rather than date numbers and will need to be converted if you wish to use them in calculations:

In Word the information is pasted as rows, with each item separated by tabs. To turn this into a table, simply select Convert Text to Table and nominate the tabs to become the column delimiters. As with Excel you can now adjust column widths and format the table to appear the way you want:

There is one final catch with this approach. I mentioned earlier that the Gantt chart needed to be maximised so that all of the table or at least the portion you want to copy is visible, but obviously some maps will always be bigger than the Gantt window. The problem with this is that there seems to be no way to scroll down while copying from the Gantt table. Edit: it turns out that all you need to do is highlight a row then press Shift and the Down Arrow key to highlight the area you want even if it extends beyond the bottom of the visible page. See the addendum for more details.

There are two workarounds. The first is simply to copy the visible section then paste this in Word or Excel before scrolling down and repeating the copying process with the next section. The second is a little more complicated but means that you can copy the entire map in one go.

First you collapse the Gantt table so that only the main topics are visible, then select all the collapsed main topics. Now expand the map and all of it including all subtopics and tasks should be highlighted and can be copied, with one annoying exception – if the last main topic in the map has sub-topic tasks, none of these will be selected. The simplest way to overcome this is to create a dummy final main topic with no subtopics and format it as a task with start and due date information (the latter preferably beyond the final date of the the actual tasks in the map). This dummy topic will “protect” the subtopics of the preceding main topic and can be deleted from the Excel or Word document that you export to.

Limitations:

There is no easy way to distinguish main topics or other topic levels once they are combined in a single column in the exported document. The easiest way to do this is to capitalise or manually number them in the map before exporting.

The other main limitation is that only basic task information is exported – start and due dates, progress and resources. While this is probably enough for most basic purposes it would be helpful if other features such as task priority or even topic notes could be exported as well.

The main limitation is the slightly clumsy way all this has to be done. While it is not terribly complicated, Mindjet should make it a good deal easier to export from the Gantt chart. It would be even better if such a “flat” table option could be made available in the export/share menu.

In my follow-up post I describe some additional techniques and ideas on how to use this process.

The world of add-ins for MindManager has always been interesting, if a bit fluid. MindManager (MM) is one of the few desktop mind mapping programs with an API which allows the development of third-party add-ins and as a result a few great examples have appeared over the years – and often, unfortunately, also disappeared a few years later. Some were broken by MM upgrades which occasionally can change quite fundamental aspects of the program; others were brought out by Mindjet to be integrated into MM, a process which sometimes resulted in them being dumbed down as important but complex features were removed in misguided attempts to make these add-ins more user friendly.

Despite these difficulties a few companies have continued to support MM a range of established add-ins and even occasionally develop new ones. One example is UK company Olympic Limited which produces two of my favourite add-ins, WordX and MAP for MindManager. WordX offers a much more sophisticated version of Word export than MM’s built-in facility, with much greater control, for example the ability to tailor which Word style is applied to groups of topics or even individual topics. WordX also uses Word’s own templates, which means that it is much easier to use default Word styles in reformatting and editing the resulting documents.

However it is MAP that I wanted to highlight in this post. MAP – Map Action Pack – is as Olympic put it a “re-envisioning” of the company’s previous successful OPTi-Add-In which contained a number of handy commands which extended MM’s core feature set. MAP takes this a step further with the latest version 1.6 providing 30 extra commands and over 350 additional icons.

While several add-ins may have more than one key feature – and there’s certainly nothing wrong with specialisation – none offer the sheer range provided by MAP. Hence the Swiss army knife comparison. I think a lot of children (especially those who grew up in the 1970s and earlier) as well as anyone who’s gone bush walking, tramping or camping will be familiar with these. In their simplest form they offer just a blade or two, but go further up the range to the Mountaineer or the Ranger and you will be presented with dozens of tools like saws, scissors, openers and corkscrews. There will also be one or two things you don’t recognise and don’t think you’ll need, but you never know when they might prove to be useful, if not essential in an emergency.

So it goes with MAP. It’s 30 functions are organised into eight groups – Navigation, Auto Views, Show/Hide, Map Actions, Topic Actions, Linking, Math and a new group for version 1.6, Exports.  It isn’t possible to describe all 30 actions in a single post and they range from the “wow, that’s really useful” to the “what’s the use of that?”, but the point is that each user will have a different idea about which functions fall into each of these categories and those that are somewhere in between.

MAP ribbon

With this in mind I’m going to talk about one of MAP’s features which I find particularly useful and here I have to declare an interest. I have acted as a beta tester for a couple of MAP’s functions – the Image Export facility which debuts in version 1.6 and the Fixed Topic Width feature which appeared in an earlier version. The latter feature is based in part on a suggestion I made to someone who wanted to standardise the width of topics in their maps.

So on to my favourite in the MAP collection – the Image Export facility. I believe this may prove to be the standout with a lot of people because it fixes a basic shortcoming in MM which Mindjet have consistently failed to address – the lack of any ability to export MM slides as images to PowerPoint (PP). It is of course possible to export a MM map as a text outline to PP or to make use of PP’s rather primitive graphic objects, but MM provides no facility to send actual images of parts of the map directly to PP.

Many people have wanted to do this in a more effective manner than taking screen shots of bits of mindmaps and pasting them in PP one-by-one. As a result a number of enthusiasts have tried to develop workarounds based on various undocumented aspects of MM, combined with little-used features in PP. I’ve also suggested options using third-party applications, which was partly the reason I was asked to test the beta version of MAP 1.6. While these have filled a need I think all the authors involved would agree that the results are a little fiddly in use.

MAP provides a more elegant solution and a much better experience for the end user. To begin you set up slides within MM in exactly the same way that you would for a MM presentation or a conventional MM-to-PP export. Then you can use MAP’s image export facility to export individual JPG images of these slides or to send the images either to MS Word or PowerPoint.

This export process is very simple. First check you have all the slides you need and how they appear (a tip – you can hide various topic attributes, like for example the slide icons). Then you use MAP’s settings to determine whether the export process will use the map background slide colour or remove this to make the background transparent; this is especially important for PP if you don’t want to obscure the background that’s provided by the PP slide template. MAP will retain your selection until you change this setting.

When you are ready to export select the MAP tab to call up the MAP ribbon and then click either the Image Export button to create JPG image files of each of the slides, or the arrow underneath the button to select image export to either Word or PowerPoint. If you elect to export the images as images you will be asked where you want to save the resulting JPG files; these are then created with filenames based on a combination of a number and the main topic text.

If you decide instead to export to Word or PP you will then be offered the option to use the default template in either program or to select another template. MAP will then create either a new Word or PP document fairly quickly; in the former, the slides will appear as images, preceded by the text contained in each slide’s main topic which will formatted using the templates default level 1 heading style. Similarly in exporting to PP each MM slide will appear as a separate slide with the main topic text appearing as the slide heading. This means you can create a complete PowerPoint presentation or Word documentation of your mindmap in seconds.

Sample MAP slide export

There are only two or three minor shortcomings to the image export process. The first is that while the export map images are clear and usable, they are not quite the same resolution as MM slides viewed (or printed) within MM itself; if you want this level of quality you will need to use the workaround I documented and mentioned earlier which involves using image printing software to create high-res image files.

The second is caused by a limitation inherent to the MM slide facility – it does not show MM’s user-inserted relationship lines which link topics that are not on the same tree as the main topic in the slide. If you want to do this you will have to use the Windows snipping tool or something similar to take a snapshot of the linked topics and then paste the result in the PP or Word document.

The third is more subtle and is only really an issue if you make use of the often-overlooked capacity of MM slides to “remember” the level of map expansion that was applied when they were created, irrespective of the level of expansion applied subsequently in the map. This feature is handy within MM because it means you can make multiple slides of the same topic showing its branches in different levels of expansion and also because it’s the basis of MM’s ability to allow users to expand or contract topic branches on slides “live” during a presentation. The MAP slide export works differently and will show topics only with the level of expansion applied to the map at the time of export and not that which was applied when the slides were created.

These are minor quibbles in what is otherwise an great feature. And while image export is the pick of the MAP pack (for me at least anyway), there are plenty of other goodies. These include the ability I mentioned earlier to impose a fixed width on MM topics, as well as facilities to “sweep” a map removing task icons and other features with a single command, globally alter the font in topic notes, hyperlink two topics in the same map, convert sub-topics to markers or to notes, or to switch them to call-outs and to resize topic images – just to name a few.

In summary, I imagine most users would find something in MAP to more than justify its purchase – and if you have ever wanted to turn your mindmap into a PowerPoint presentation, or to document the slide images in Word, the image export facility alone is worth the price of admission.