What do you wish was easier to do with mind mapping software?
Jul 1st, 2010 | By Chuck Frey | Category: Discussion
In the world of mind mapping software, where users are faced with an ever-growing toolkit of capabilities and options offered by a steadily growing number of developers, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
That leads me to this week’s question:
What do you wish was easier to do with mind mapping software?
Please keep in mind that the intent of this question isn’t to complain about one mind mapping software developer or another, but to learn more about how to improve the overall practice of creating software-produced mind maps.
I’m also hoping that your responses will also give me some insights into areas where you need help in using mind mapping software – which will help me to deliver new blog posts, reports and tutorials that meet your needs.
Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments area below. As always, I look forward to your feedback, which is always quite thought-provoking – thanks!
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I’d like to see easier conversion of selected end nodes into a to-do list to make Next Actions easier to take action on.
I used MindManager. Frustrations:
Sharing maps with people that don’t have the software.
Better integration with Microsoft applications, especially outlook
Lighter, faster software. MM is too heavy and buggy.
I have always had trouble trying to convert mind maps to Word documents. In MindManager you are clearly able to create a template for this but it is far from intuitive.
I tend now to just pdf the map and send that out to people who do not use MindManager (unfortunately most of the people I interact with) but it restricts the use of notes, as these do not show. But sometimes they need the data and a Word document is the only thing that will do it. Then I find I have titles in huge fonts and big gaps between paragraphs and the whole thing takes about 20 pages of a Word doc.
An easy way to generate good looking Word docs from a mind map would be a great help.
Its difficult to talk about the shortcomings of mind mapping software generally without referring to specific programs, unless you have used a lot of them.
Bearing that in mind, you can often get a good idea about what is missing or can be done better in many mind mapping programs by looking at the add-ins created for each program.
In MindManager for example, the excellent Power Markers add-in provides two critical bits of functionality missing from the basic program – the ability to show topics in a list based on various criteria at the same time as they are displayed as a map, and colour-coding of topics based on due date, % completed etc in a much more fine-grained way than the basic MM roll-up (the first of these features may address Incubar’s problem).
Ideally both of these features should be built into MM itself. Likewise MM add-ins auch as Export to Microsoft Excel (which does what its name states), GyroQ (which captures and imports ideas to MM), Ontaris Outlooklinker (which improve syncing with Outlook) and JCVGantt (Mindjet’s own gantt program) should all be incoprorated within MM. I sure similar situations apply to other mind mapping programs.
Other aspects specifically of MM which need improvement (and which may or may not apply to other programs) include:
- Exporting to Word
- Importing from and exporting to tables in Excel and Word
- The ability to handle more than one hyperlink per topic
- Lack of a timeline view
- Lack of flexibility in the layout and placement of subtopics
Alex
The most needed features for me are:
=The Ability to enter citations in the notes so that they can appear in the generated document after exporting to Word
=The ability to insert tables in the notes that can be exported to word
=Better export to Word
=support for right to left languages
I make lots of mind maps so I’d like to see some organizational options built in.
I wish mind mapping software would automatically create a master map or index map. The master map could be set up with categories that each new map could be sorted into, and a link to each map would be created too.
In my imaginary mind map world, you’d just pull up a master map, locate the map you wanted to work with by browsing through the categories, and then click the map’s link to open it.
Maybe some mind mapping software already does this sort of thing? None of them I use have an auto-map feature like this though, so I make my master maps by hand which is very time consuming.
I would bow on bended knee to anybody who can come up with a way to get from a filing system structured in a mindmap (the best way to structure an office filing system) to actual labels. It drives me nuts to develop a comprehensive filing structure in a mindmap, and then have to type labels! (And, yes, I’ve tried exporting to Excel, thence to mailmerge etc etc. It should be simple but it isn’t.)
My other wish is that MindJet would stop treating Mind Manager for the Mac as an unwanted stepchild, and actually implement at least one of the most fundamental functions in mindmapping: the ability to create, from a branch that’s getting complicated, a submap linked to the mothermap. They’ve had this in MM for Windows either from the beginning, or near the beginning.