MindGenius 4 MindGenius 4 does a nice job of exporting your mind maps to a decent-looking PowerPoint file. Objects option, this outline export is very clean (see the screen shot at right) and should be easy to embellish in PowerPoint. When you do this, each first-level topic of your mind map is converted to a separate PowerPoint slide, with the topic text as the slide title and its topics and subtopics as bullet points and sub-bullets. Export as outline: The other option for exporting your mind maps to PowerPoint is to do so in an outline format. I don’t want to have to work that hard to incorporate data from my mind maps into a presentation! I hope Mindjet spends some time improving this feature, because it leaves something to be desired. You can select and adjust the size of each topic, which corrects this problem, but that approach seemed overly fussy to me. Some of the text actually breaks in the middle of words to a new line. Not very attractive, and somewhat hard to read. For some reason, MindManager converted my map branches into a blocky topic style, with text in black. Export as PowerPoint objects: When I did this type of export to one of my mind maps, I expected it to retain the look and feel of the branches in my map. MindManager 9 enables you to export your mind maps to PowerPoint in 2 different formats: As an outline and as images of the mind map branches (called “export as PowerPoint objects” in the dialog box). As you can see, it gives you quite a few options as far as what gets exported or not. The screen shot at right shows what the export to PowerPoint dialog box looks like. If you have a standard corporate template that you use for your presentations, this is a real-time saver. MindManager can export to a plain PowerPoint file (no template) or to the PowerPoint template of your choice. In fact, to keep their attention, you really ought to be selective about how much detail you show to them. That’s a valuable feature, in my opinion, because not everything you put in your mind maps needs to be shared with an audience. Because MindManager only exports visible topics, you can use filters to hide those topics you don’t want exported. You can export all topics to PowerPoint, or only selected topics. For a better approach, see the review of NovaMind 5 below. Clearly, this needs to be made adjustable in future versions of MindManager. This causes you as the presenter and the audience to lose a sense of the context of the topics they’re viewing. Also, it’s hard to follow the progression from one topic to another, because MindManager treats them as separate, discreet objects. If you’re trying to present to a large group or via a web conference (the situation I found myself in several months ago), you’ll discover that this is a major disadvantage: The mini-grouping of topics is so small compared to the screen real estate that it may be almost unreadable. When you convert it to a slide, it becomes a small image floating in a lot of white space (see the screen shot at right for an actual example of this). Where this becomes a shortcoming is if you want to export a simple branch with only two sub-topics, for example. Why? Because you can’t adjust the size of the topics and subtopics in your slides. I’ve used MindManager to make a presentation, and I found it to be fairly challenging. MindManager then adds that topic and any sub-topics to a slide sorter to the left of the work space – which looks and functions very much like the one contained in PowerPoint. You do so by right-clicking on the topic that you want to convert into a slide, and selecting the “make a slide” command (see the screen shot on the previous page). Starting with version 9, Mindjet moved to a new presentation model, which now enables users to designate which branches and sub-branches should be included in your presentation. It basically walked you around each branch and sub-īranch of your map, displaying each one in clockwise order. In past versions of MindManager, you could make presentations directly from the program, but the program decided what to display. I’ll also compare the pros and cons of each developer’s approach to exporting, and what this implies in terms of how much reformatting you’ll need to do in PowerPoint. In this report, we’ll analyze each of the major mind mapping programs and outline the capabilities they offer. With many mind mapping programs, it’s even possible to make presentations directly from it. It’s an ideal tool for gathering and organizing your thoughts, and then moving them over to Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation program – either as visual objects or converted to text. A comparison of PowerPoint export formats in mind mapping software by Chuck Frey, Mind Mapping Software Blog Exporting mind maps to PowerPoint files is a common task that many people need to do with mind mapping software.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |