If you prefer to work with lists instead of boxes, this is another useful way to view and quickly update information on your mindmap. After all, if the purpose of mindmapping is get all your ideas on one page, why would you need a rule to help you locate or select a topic or subtopic? After playing with this feature a bit, I did find it useful for locating information on complex, highly detailed maps and making bulk selections and changes to related topics (like changing the color of the topic box or the status of an item or resource for a group of topics). At first, I questioned the need for this feature. Once you’ve defined a rule set, MindManager 7 gives you the option to save the rule to select or filter topics. This tool allows you to set rules for quickly locating and selecting topics based on a variety of properties available in the application. If you can’t tell already, I enjoy using Mindjet’s MindManager, so when David asked me to step in to review MindManager 7, I was more than happy to oblige. I can’t take the credit for this jump in productivity – MindManager has a simple, elegant interface and a comprehensive set of keyboard shortcuts that make this application intuitive and easy to use. With that same hour on my MacBook, I was able to download the MindManager 6 trial version, run through the tutorial, and create a mindmap that captured 90% of the information. To give you a more meaningful comparison than the one made in the podcast, I spent about an hour wrestling with Visio to create a mindmap that still only captured less than 25% of the concepts I was trying to relate to the project team – and I consider myself fairly proficient in Visio. (If you listen to Podcast #131, I do make a comparison between mindmapping with Visio and MindManager, which may not be appropriate to put into print). While Visio is a great application for flowcharting, it is not available for the Mac, and the mindmapping templates and functions leave a lot to be desired. Now I realize there are other software solutions for mindmapping, and my first attempt at mindmapping this project was started using MS Visio on my PC at work. I was (and still am) in the midst of a fairly large project at work, and I needed a tool to help me bring together all the data, concepts, and proposed solutions on one page. Given David’s positive comments, I thought it would be worth checking out for myself.
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