About 8 months ago, I was dabbling around with MindManager org charts and took a Snagit snap of one and then started rapidly adding hot spots.  Before you know it I had a pretty complex image and when I went to save or export it, I realized that I had to save it to Flash.  I’ve taken intro level classes in Macromedia Flash, but working in Snagit was a great deal easier for what I needed to accomplish.

I wasn’t trying to make a South Park cartoon episode nor make a radical flash animated website, just a functional, clickable org chart.

Several months later, and I got around to experimenting more with this functionality, and I think it is extremely useful in making a mindmap very rich in content for sharing either on the web, or for sharing directly with people that do not own MindManager.

Sorry Mindjet, this one may not help sales, but as soon as you find some more ways to get rich media into MindManager, I’ll be a very loud evangelist again.  Until then its work around city!

So I put together a couple maps (one political trying to make sense out of the news and probably failing, and one about a new Google advertising ad system).  Neither make much for reading, but I treated the topics as an opportunity to play with MindManager, Snagit and learn something new.

Plus, it was a good excuse to procrastinate on hunting down some cheap flights to Austin for SXSW.  I hate booking flights.  I have no reason for this, just always feel like I’m getting ripped off.  I’d almost rather drive.

After creating those, I received a email or call from someone in the MindManager Yahoo Group asking me to walk through the creation process and did that.  During that session, I learned and realized that these files do not have to be published on the internet, but that they can be viewable from a hard drive as well, the video shows this in practice and shows how it works.

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I have been using MindManager mindmapping software for several years now.  I am a trainer and love the program.  I do believe that it makes me more effective, more efficient and helps me keep information together in a way that might even make me smarter.

Those are all very useful traits to cultivate in yourself and for students, especially college students and high school students that is even more important.  This world is not getting any less crowded and students today have a great deal more competition than I had just a couple decades back.

That said buying MindManager as a student is a relatively inexpensive affair as Mindjet, the makers of MindManger offer some great educational discounts through partners such as Campus Tech.

Get Academic Discounts on Software at CampusTech

Campus Tech Rates with the Educational Discount on MindManager Product Line

$150 is a great price for this software!  The rates for Mac users is very cheap as well.

Now there is one very cool thing about doing research with MindManager in a mindmap form.

It is very easy to recycle and reuse later.  I could definitely see a teenager and especially a college student keeping notes in MindManager and using those notes very effectively as they go to work as an intern or kick off their career. 

Imagine having a large chunk of your college education immediately at your finger tips!  Now, I do understand, one of the reasons for going to college and getting a degree is not only to learn a discipline, but to learn how to learn that discipline and stay on top of a changing landscape.

I can not really think of a better tool to help a student develop that skill set.  I’d call it a discipline, but MindManager makes it so easy that its like saying that kids swinging on swing sets have developed a discipline.   Can it really be a discipline, if its fun and easy?

It’s just too easy to be a discipline.

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I was just reading over at Family Matters, who in the great spirit of the blogosphere was nice enough to quote arstechnica.com, who reported from MacWorld that Apple is picking up the licensing engine for Dragon Naturally Speaking, throwing out iListen and pushing in Dragon Naturally Speaking into MacSpeech in a product called Dictate (in beta).

I came out of the fortune 500 corporate finance world powered by PC’s and the Mac was always some obscure piece of equipment that under funded*(or over funded depending on your perspective) art schools tended to use to get work done.  Over the last 2-3 years, that inbred corporate perspective has been changed as I started to do a great deal more work with graphics, video, audio and web design.

One of the things keeping me on the fence from making a final conversion or at least making an addition to my computer collection in the form of an Apple iBook or an Apple Air (odd name in that I want a computer with substance as opposed to a box filled with . . . .) is the absence of 2 tools.  One is a better version of MindManager for the Mac and the other is a great speech recognition program, preferably Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Here’s the quote from the articles I mentioned above:

ars technica reports from MacWorld:

As Nate noted on his staff journal this week, MacSpeech has now licensed the technology behind Dragon Naturally Speaking for its new product, MacSpeech Dictate (iListen is no more). MacSpeech claims that, with Nuance’s speech processing engine, Dictate is more accurate than iListen ever could be. We hit up the MacSpeech booth on the Macworld Expo floor to find out more about the software.

First off, Dictate is not shipping yet (contrary to conflicting reports on the Web). The software is still in beta, and we weren’t allowed to play with it directly—instead, we had to watch a demo. With Dictate, “training” the software to your voice only takes ten minutes, the company claims, which will then bring the software up to 95 percent accuracy. From there, it learns based on your speech. Like Dragon (read Nate’s review for more detail), there are a number of commands you can use to correct errors if they crop up, in addition to commands that can be used to open, close, switch, and otherwise control various Mac applications. If more than one person uses your Mac and wants to use Dictate, you can set up different profiles for each person’s voice—in addition to plain ol’ American English, Dictate is capable of understanding a number of accents, including (as our demo showed us) Australian English. [Read entire article.]

My wallet won’t be happy ($199 - includes headset) but my carpal tunnel can’t wait for the release. Stay tuned, I’ll be talking about this a lot more.

Family Matters » » MacSpeech Announces Dictate

*  My wife graduated from a great art school called the Savannah College of Art and Design.  I do believe that art schools can teach very useful knowledge, skills and abilities that society needs for many purposes. 

** On a complete side note if you want to find a great weekend getaway I highly endorse Savannah.  Break out your beach stuff, and pack up your travel gear and check out Savannah.  I highly recommend it in April when the flowers and trees are blooming and the beach is hot but not too hot.

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I wrote a week or two back that there was a MindManager Pro 7 update available, but for some reason I could not find it when I went through normal channels on my computer(video on how to find MM update availability manually).

Normal Channels being either me hitting the update button in the menu or having the program itself automatically check for an update.

So today when I went to launch MindManager 7 Pro (shortly after waking up!  ) this time I received a pop up window in the program telling me what I already know, that an update was available for my computer.  So I clicked on the button to get it and get the show on the road!

Here is what I found on the mindjet site after accepting the update.

THINGS YOU SHOULD NKNOW BEFORE UPDATING MINDMANAGER PRO 7

• You will have to reboot your windows machine after the installation, so install when you do not need your other programs running.
• You will have to shut down all windows applications and MindManager before installing.  That includes Outlook, which on some computers will run in a hidden capacity in the right task bar.
• Now the update is 82mb long, not super large, but not super small either.
• You should not loose your Map Templates built up, saved up and downloaded over the ages

If you can’t find where your Map Templates are located in MindManager 7 like me, just go to your tools menu, its the button on the right.  I always look for it in the formatting section and never find it. 

The Upgrade Windows preview so you do not panic

1. 
1. There was no virus in mine, you should not have one in yours.
2. 
1. I mentioned this above, this is the first time they give you this type of warning.
2. Note. they do not warn you that you will have to reboot your system.
3. 
1. In case you were not paying attention the first time, you may get a 2nd warning even when all of your applications are closed. 
4. 
1. I wish mindjet had told me about this one before I started the installation.  It is a common enough practice, but it never fails to catch me by surprise with many programs.

So all in all the installation went fine.  I do not know yet why it took so long for my computer to find the update, not like I was looking for movers New York to ship a whale cross country or something (bad analogy), but all in all I’m through the holidays, into the new year and the update is running.  I’ll let you know how it works as I use it.

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OK, this is probably overstating the obvious for many people, but every now and then something are right in front of us and we just can not find it when we need it.  So I put together this article Maven Mapper’s Information » MindManager Update Available for MindManager Pro 7 - Uh Maybe . . .   and this video to show you how to check for a MindManager update. 

Hope it helps if you happen to be a little lost looking for this, it happens to everyone from time to time. 

Side note, I had a car a couple years ago, and every time I went to the dealer, they did not have a particular accessory I was looking for. They gave me the website for Chrysler 300 accessories, but when I got home, I wasn’t able to find the section I needed. I went about a year without that part, because I seemed to have some mental block preventing me from finding the item when I got home. These days, I’d probably pull out my phone and grabe a quick video to jog my memory.

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There is supposed to be a new update available for MindManager Pro 7.  The update number is 7.1.388.

I would love to tell you about it, however, when I click the update button, I get the message that I have latest update which was 7.0.429.

So somewhere along the way there are some cobwebs somewhere, either on my machine or in MMPro7 or on the Mindjet site.

The MindManager groups at Yahoo lists a manual download link location at

MindManager Manual Download Link

Note, make sure you write down your license number before you run it and also if you have a number of customizations, I highly advise you sign up for the Yahoo MindManager group and check out some of the tips and tricks recommended there.

Well, that’s all I know about that.  I’m off for the holidays in another 24 hours.  Going to drive a lot, visit St Louis and Peoria, then Atlanta and back to North Carolina.  Visiting with Family, getting the kids outside in the snow, playing a little pool with my brother (he just installed some fancy pool table lights ) and hopefully get some relaxation in before 2008 kicks off with a busy bang.

If I get a little spare time, I’m hoping to reorganize my collection of mindmaps.  I’m hoping to organize them better for access to the information, but I’m also hoping to extrapolate out templates from some of these maps for future mindmap template sharing.  Plus, I’m hoping to cleanse some of the maps, so that I can share the actual information while protecting the innocent. 

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This week I am reviewing an issue that I noticed with MindManager Pro 7.  It specifically relates to the export of a map into a PowerPoint Presentation.

I’m still trying to document the situation, but wanted to take an initial attempt to describe the issue.

When I have a topic with say 3 sub topics below it and one of those sub topics is just an image, the image will not export to PowerPoint with the other sub topics.

Instead, I must select on that single topic with the image and click the link to add a new slide, just for that image.

Also, I cannot have any text included with the image on any topic, if I want the text to export to Powerpoint.

I have noticed that MindManager seems to work fine, when its generating a mindmap image, but not when its exporting an image.

I first noticed this when I was working on a client web site that specializes in drug rehab, but couldn’t quite put my finger on the problem as I thought it was just a fluke on a presentation with just a single picture.  Today, when I was working on a separate presentation for a different customer with a dozen or so images in the mindmap, I noticed that the problem happened consistently.

As I mentioned, I’m still working to identify the parameters of the issue, and I’m hoping to capture it on video.

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Timothy from the MindManager support team was able to guide me through the process of correcting mindmanager excel error that I encountered last week, when I attempted to embed an excel range within a mindmap.

The Steps of the MindManager Excel fix was fairly easy.

1. Close all MindMaps and the Mindmanager application.
2. Close any programs that are working to access Mindmanager such as:
1. Outlook
2. Excel
3. Possibly explorer or PowerPoint if connected through a map
3. Click Start
4. Click Control Panel
5. Select Add/Remove Programs
6. Choose MindManager Pro 7 Install
7. Choose the Repair Option and run it
8. After the repair finishes, restart your computer.

That’s all it took for me.  As a follow up Timothy also suggested that I might have to run the repair function on excel, but I did not need to do this to make it work.

The Fix all Fix for MindManager

Now it strikes me that this same solution has been suggested to me by Mindjet techsupport for many MindManager errors over the years.  I’d suggest that anyone that needs to fix an error in MindManager, should consider this option first, especially if they are in a hurry and tech support is not readily available and they do not have time to await a solution in their mailboxes.

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A couple weeks back I received an email from a friend at Mindjet, the makers of MindManager.  They were looking for customer vignettes or success stories about using MindManager.

Now I have been using MindManager for several years and have many success stories.  Using MindManager its actually very easy to have success stories, but after several years it becomes some what difficult to pick them all out.  Its like trying to pick out your favorite Michael Jordan moment.  MJ had so many moments that they all start to swirl together like a flock of birds resting on a bar raised high up in the heavens.

Well for me, I did not think of a business success, but a very personal success that I experienced with my family.  It was not a success where we gathered together and learned how to fix a business process or improve the bottom line, or even resolve a decades old dispute about who burned down the barn 100 years ago (that’s still a mystery and probably one that will never be revealed).

Some of you may have recalled my writing about this in the past.

I turned to MindManager as a useful tool to help my family come together in the face of my grandfather’s recent passing.  My grandfather, Harold Bumeter, passed away last winter and after sorting through family photos all day long and reliving many memories, my family and I were exhausted and a little overwhelmed with the preparations for his funeral, which would take place the next day.

I intended to say a few words at the funeral and I wanted to gather up as many important perspectives and thoughts from the rest of my family.  At the end of the day, the last thing I wanted was to miss something important or not say something that needed to be said.

I also did not want the words that I would say to be something that only I offered, I wanted to include the rest of the my family.  Its a heavy responsibility to speak on behalf of your family and not easy, yet we felt that we owed this in small part to my grandfather.

So we gathered everyone together in my grandparents living room.  We removed a large painting from the wall and I hooked up my portable projector to my computer and the entire family gathered around and we started to map out the memories and thoughts that were important to us.  The things that had influenced us the most,the things that we remembered the most, and the things that made my grandfather special.

Everyone contributed and the effort worked very well.  When I say worked, I do not mean to imply that we sat down and brainstormed up a eulogy.  Instead we all started to heal a little bit.  Now it has not been a year, and from my perspective and I’m sure for many of us, the healing process continues and will not be over for some time.  However, the essence of the utility of mindmapping in this fashion really enabled us to communicate with each other, and in some ways to reach a kind of consensus.

So when Mindjet asked for my favorite mindmap, this was the map that I shared.  There are not many tools that you can use in a corporate board room to get the job done and still trust enough to take home to your family and help each other communicate and heal through a family tragedy.

The mindmap itself does not really encompass all the rules of mind mapping as they might be envisioned by a Buzan purist.  I’m not knocking that school of thought, but I would point out that mindmaps do 2 important things.

1. They help us reach consensus and communicate
2. They help us make connections and process information faster.

This particular map was useful for rapidly working through the first point.  It was not designed for future study or work or even a project plan so point 2 was irrelevant.

Regardless, it did work and for that my time and effort working with MindManager as a mindmapper and a trainer has been light years beyond invaluable.

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