MindGenius
AVERAGE RATING
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Features and Functionality
MindGenius 3 has now been released and is available for general download and purchase. With a host of new features to make working with your information even more effective, MindGenius 3 significantly improves your analysis, brainstorming, presentation and task management capabilities.
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New Features Include:
- Ribbon User Interface which allows for improved brainstorming, presentations, analysis and task management functionality and easier access to the most commonly used features and functionality.
- Improved Analysis capability to help you sort your information and add quick filters to get a different view on your data eg by category, actions due/ over due, cost or task properties.
- MS Excel export for use with pivot table analysis, parts lists, costs, task management, and FMEA Analysis, allowing you to work with numerical values as well as words.
- Numerical fields added that allow you to record actual work hours, costs and quantities and undertake cost and quantity calculations.
- Updated image library with a suite of pictures that can be used royalty free by all MindGenius users.
- Ability to add and edit your own question sets in the Question Tool allowing you to undertake improved planning and brainstorming sessions and create frameworks for meetings and customer facing sessions.
- Timer to allow you to keep on schedule in brainstorming, meetings and presentations.
Download the tool from the publisher’s website using this link |
On January 14, 2010 Peter Roberts wrote:
Mindgenius must be one of the easiest pieces of mindmapping software to learn. Inputting is as simple as typing and pressing return for child branches, or pressing return and typing and pressing return for siblings. This makes brainstorming simple to the extent that you can virtually forget about the software.
Moving the branches once they are typed is easy too: just drag and drop, while a “shadow” shows you which branch branch it’s going to be attached to as you move it around so there’s no danger of creating a sibling when you wanted a child.
To edit the text of an existing branch, just double click on the branch or press F2. To edit the style of one or more branches, select them and press F3 which brings up a dialogue box for you to change the font, branch shape and fill, connector shapes, and branch colour.
One of the best features of MindGenius, though, is the Map Explorer pane, on the lefthand side of the screen. This is simply an expandable list of all the branch titles. As you click on a title, that branch with its children becomes the map focus in the main pane called the map editor. This is ideal for checking through the work you have done and re-arranging it, and even adding or deleting branches. This is convenient too in presentation, full-screen format, as the retractable map explorer remains at the side of the screen, enabling the presenter to move around the map and focus wherever he or she wishes with the minimum of distraction. (Branches may also be made the focus by selecting, and clicking on the make focus command on the home ribbon at the top of the screen or pressing f6 on the keyboard).
Zooming may be automatic, best fit (plus width and height fit) and percentage (available with automatic fit from the bar at the bottom right). Panning, if required, can be selected from the same ribbon, or MindGenius have just introduced (in version 3.1 in the last few days) the auto-panning feature where by pressing the lefthand mouse button on any white area of the map for about half a second, the pointer becomes a hand and the mouse can be used to pan around the map.
MindGenius has all the usual analysis, resources and task tools and everything is exportable to the main Office software elements, including Outlook (for tasks and resources) and Excel, as well as pdf and html.
Printing can include the entire map, the current view, filtered branches, or ingeniously and a godsend for those of us who use it for writing reports and talks, printing only the branches with notes. This means, using the notes editor in its secondary position along the bottom of the screen, you can write in your text in the notes for the branches you want to use as headings or subheadings, using the other branches, visible in the map editor at the top of the screen, as aides-memoir, and then just print out the text you have written, complete with the headings and sub-headings you have chosen.
Finally, at least for this review, every branch can take any number of attachments, using any sort of file or web address. Ad mittedly it can’t go directly to a particular email but perhaps that will be a future development.
Since I started using MindGenius in 2007, it has come along in leaps and bounds and MindGenius 3 puts it streets ahead, in terms of convenience of use, of what it used to be. But what I like about it most, after its ease of use, compared to the output of other software I have seen, is that it always looks good, whether you going for the curvilinear and ta;pered lines, with the colorful illustrated appearance for use in education or in the more formal layout, with narrow, curved or straight lines required for business settings.
My wishlist is very short: level one branches are draggable to improve the appearance or layout of a particular map (when auto-layout is turned off). Sometimes it would be good if lower levels could be adjusted in a similar way. On the other hand, I would not want to be obliged to consider the positioning of every branch at every level. Normally I am content to leave the layout to the software (which includes the traditional format as well as input, output, organogram, clockwise, anticlockwise etc).
Had I not just downloaded the latest update yesterday, I might have asked for a number of functions to be more fully available, whichever of the ribbon menus was in place at the top of the screen (home, insert, format, analyze, tasks, export and tools). But now it is possible to add any menu item to the quick access menu, which by default lies in the top lefthand corner of the screen but can be moved to below the ribbon or even, if the ribbon is minimised, take the place of the ribbon.
I use MindGenius because it is easy, unfussy and always looks good and the developers are becoming ever more responsive to the comments and requests of the users. What more could you ask.
Admittedly there is not a lot of criticism in here but to be honest I would be struggling to find much to complain about.