MindMapping Tools
Yet another powerful tool that I’ve just recently found is MindManager. Actually, it’s introduced me to the whole concept of mind maps, the non-linear method of organizing thoughts and information, more in a tree structure.
The first tool I found appears to be the most widely used – MindManager X5 Pro. Keep in mind that I hadn’t had any exposure to mind mapping before seeing this, but I was completely wow-ed by this tool. After spending the 3 weeks of the free trial period using it, I was even more impressed. Some of the neatest features of MindManager are the ability to integrate with Outlook, MS Project, MS Word or PowerPoint, and the ease of formatting the maps and exporting them as nice pictures to use in other places, e.g. presentations.
The main drawback to me of MindManager is the price – $349 is out of my budget at present. So, I looked around for alternatives.
I found the open source, free tool called FreeMind. I’ve downloaded it and have been making good use of it. It has the basic functionality of easily creating maps, e.g. with the Enter to create a peer node and the Insert key to create a child node. FreeMind also has some basic formatting capabilities – you can change the colors of nodes and choose whether they are underlined style or “bubble” style. You can easily move nodes around to be connected to other parent nodes by clicking and dragging.
FreeMind lacks the ability to move nodes around the canvas for more customized appearance. You can move nodes from one side of the root node to the other, but you cannot create different tree shapes as you can in MindManager. The formatting is also pretty cumbersome, as you have to navigate through several layers of menus to change almost anything on a node.
All in all, though, for basic mind mapping functionality, and for a free application, FreeMind makes the grade in my book. I’m going to continue using FreeMind until I can find enough reason to spend the multiple hundreds of dollars on MindManager.
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