MindManager 7 review gets to the core of why mind mapping software is so valuable
Aug 15th, 2007 | By Chuck Frey | Category: News
Kickstartnews.com just published a review of MindManager Pro 7, which was very positive, calling it "an unusually useful and amazingly creative product." But that’s not what I want to highlight in this post. What’s most significant here is what author Mark Goldstein has to say about the real value that mind mapping software provides to business people today. I think he has articulated this quite clearly (he mentions MindManager 7 repeatedly here, but keep in mind that his comments can also be applied to most commercially available mind mapping programs):
"We’ve been getting along just fine for all these years, developing plans and ideas, creating designs, making agendas and so on. So why on earth do we need to add yet another tool or layer to the process? The answer is unusually simple. In fact, for whatever business or effort you’re involved in, MindManager Pro 7 can used to effectively and productively reduce the number of layers in your design, planning and development processes. Our view is that MindManager Pro 7, if you fully embrace it for use throughout your business (no matter what size business—from one employee to thousands), can provide a versatile foundation for planning and development. From simple maps such as meeting agendas and sales projections, to deeply complex expression of new ideas, MindManager Pro 7 provides you with ability to physically demonstrate the way in which you visualize a particular idea or plan. At its core therefore, MindManager Pro 7 is a tool to help others understand what you’re thinking about, how you thought it up in the first place, and all the things you think are important and relate to the main point you’re trying to make, thereby providing the means by which people can see your thoughts from your perspective. That’s gold baby—pure gold."
To summarize, what Marks is saying here is this:
- Mind mapping software is a versatile platform for business planning and development. Because of its inherent flexibility – the way in which it "encapsulates" information and ideas so they can be easily manipulated, annotated and rearranged – there isn’t another genre of software that comes close!
- Mind mapping software exposes the thinking behind your ideas, and places them in context with one another, which increases your ability to share them more effectively.
I couldn’t have said it better myself!
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I think there is at least one other key benefit to using mind mapping software. That is that one source of data can be transformed in to a variety of different publications filtered to suit the audience.
Andrew, good mention above. Mind Mapping could be an ivory tower if it weren’t for export into mainstream software offerings, such as Word, Powerpoint, Adobe PDF and Project.
MindManager 7 Mac
I’d been looking forward to an upgrade from MindManager 6 for Mac. There were a number of things I liked about the program, including the default way that it styled a mindmap but it seemed incomplete or immature, as one might expect a new version of a program to be, and in particular I really wanted outline capabilities along with the mindmap.
I was therefore very excited to download the trial of MindManager 7, however I then found that it was really closer to a mature beta than a “ready to charge real money for it” product. In particular I wrote to them asking about two anomalies 1) that Cmd-B indeed bolded text in the mindmap mode, but while the command is still available in the menu, it did not bold in outline mode 2) that it indeed supported multiline text entry and even line breaks, but you can’t see your text in outline beyond the first line. The lines otherwise look like any other line so a reader is likely to not even know if there is hidden text there or not.
I’m sure there are other problems in that I found these in just playing with it for 5 or 10 minutes, but I didn’t look further because their response to me was:
“Were sorry we can’t meet your exact needs, while we have noted your concerns we do not at this time have any plans to release an update addressing those particular issues.”
Apparently they interpret these issues of basic functionality as just being quirks of my “exact needs” and they have no intention of correcting them.
Curio now does a nice mindmap and ConceptDraw is about to upgrade their product. There are other alternatives as well for Mac, like NovaMind, and these companies care about delivering a useful and complete product to their customers. I’ll certainly be looking elsewhere before I invest any more money in a company like Mindjet.