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A comparison of document export formats in mind mapping software by Chuck Frey, Mind Mapping Software Blog Exporting mind maps to documents is a common task that many people need to do with mind mapping software. According to the results of my most recent survey, it’s also an ongoing source of frustration, because many users don’t care for the default formatting that their mind mapping software imposes on the exported document, and aren’t sure how to adjust it to better suit their needs. So I thought I’d take a closer look at each of the major mind mapping programs and the capabilities they offer. I’ll also compare the pros and cons of each developer’s approach to export customization, and what this implies in terms of how much reformatting you’ll need to do in Word. MindManager 9 MindManager 9 utilizes a tabbed dialog box to give you a great deal of control over the way in which your mind map is converted into a Word document. General settings are shown at right. As you can see, you can control: How your topics and sub-topics are numbered How deep within your mind map sub- topics should be numbered Whether or not topics should be indented in the style of a hierarchical outline (“I, A, 1, a” or “1, 1.1, 1.1.1,” for example) Document Export Comparison Page 2 Which task data, if any, should be exported Which other map attributes, such as icons, notes, callouts and other topic embellishments should be exported MindManager also enables you to export an overview map, which appears at the beginning of your document, and to create a table of contents. The second tab gives you a deeper level of control over how your map’s topics and sub-topics will be converted to headings or paragraph text when they are exported to Word. Each topic level has a drop- down box containing every text format you can imagine. The number of options is almost overwhelming. The most common complaint about MindManager’s Word export, however, is that it forces you to reformat a lot of text in Word. You can get around this by using the “plain text” option in the drop-down lists. I also like the fact that the default setting is for notes to have no formatting applied. This means they should be exported as paragraph text, which is perfect for my needs. Finally, the developers at Mindjet thoughtfully included a default button at the bottom of this tabbed dialog box. So if you mess something up, you can always return to the “factory” settings. The final tab is devoted to a number of advanced settings, such as how topic relationships and hyperlinks are handled (the default is to insert “see also” in the text), whether or not hyperlinks will be included in the exported document, how attachments are handled (what sort of prefix will be included in the exported document to reference it) and how any embedded graphics will be treated during export. Document Export Comparison Page 3 Finally, you can specify page headers and footers during the export process – nice! I exported a Linkedin Tips mind map to Word using the program’s default settings. The screen capture at right is representative of how the document is formatted. For some reason, the map title was formatted on its own page; perhaps this is by design, so it can be used as a fancy title page; it would be nice to decide during the exporting process whether or not I wanted MindManager 9 to do this. It’s a minor complaint, however. One other suggestion for the developer: Not everyone has the latest version of Microsoft Word, which saves documents in a .docx format. It would be nice if users had the option of exporting the map as a .doc file that would be compatible with older versions of Word. MindGenius 4 In MindGenius 4, clicking on the “Export to Microsoft Word” command immediately takes you to a Windows “Save as” window, and you’re prompted for a file name. It’s only after you do so that the “Save as Word” dialog box (right) pops up. The “general options” tab gives you control over: Which Word template to use; most users will default to the normal.dot template used by default for creating any new documents within Word. The other option is to maintain the fonts that MindGenius used in the mind map. Whether or not notes will be maintained in their formatted state (if you have formatted any notes text as bold, underlined, italic, etc.) or converted to plain text. How images will be handled during export. I found this to be somewhat confusing. “Insert a single image” during export sounds confusing. The other option in the drop-down list is Document Export Comparison Page 4 “split at level 1.” It’s not intuitively obvious what this means. And why would I want to place each image on its own page? Fortunately, the export dialog box contains a “help” button, so you can learn more about what each of these options means. The second tab of the “Save as Word” dialog box gives you a precise level of control over which elements of your mind map are exported to the Word document. One interesting option is to “export current view” or “entire map.” MindGenius gives you the option to focus in on a specific branch of your map, which is very useful for fully developing it without any distractions. You can use this as the basis of your document export – which could be very useful if you only want to export part of your mind map to a document. I tried this, and it worked great! “Export current view,” if checked, means that MindGenius will not include any branches that are hidden from view – in other words: Any branches that are collapsed will not be exported Any branches hidden when you “focus in” on a branch will not be exported Only topics that appear when you apply a filter to your mind map will be exported This enables you to be very selective – even downright creative – in selectively exporting parts of your mind maps to Word. For example, you could assign one type of icon to mean “export this.” You’d add it to the branches you want to be exported, and then filter the contents of your map based upon that icon, so that MindGenius would only display those branches that contain it. You would then perform the export to Word with the “export current view” radio button checked. Viola! Precise control over the content of your map to be exported. You can also “omit branches without notes” or “omit branches without sub-branches.” I’m not quite sure why you would want to do this. Document Export Comparison Page 5 The image at right displays an export of the full MindGenius 4 “welcome” map as a Word document. Note how it automatically places an image of the map at the top of the document, and how it treats the image in the main topic and the floating image (the MindGenius 4 name and logo). It appears to be a very clean export. What’s missing is control over the formats used for each level of your map. For example, first level topics like “getting started” are formatted Cambria, 14 point bold. You can’t control that from within MindGenius, which is a shortcoming. Ideally, you ought to be able to set options when performing the export that will get you as close to a finished document as possible. Otherwise, if you’re working with a complex mind map, you may be spending a lot of time adjusting formatting in Word. NovaMind 5 NovaMind 5’s Word export option is as simple as it gets: Select the “Export as MS Word” command from the program’s “file” menu and select the folder where you want the resulting .docx file to be placed. An example of the program’s output is pictured at right. I checked the program’s options to see if it enables you to adjust any export settings there – it doesn’t. I couldn’t find any documentation on the NovaMind website that gets into the specifics of exporting to Word. I was a bit surprised that this program doesn’t give you more control over exporting t Word. Some developers prefer to let Word do the heavy lifting of text reformatting, and it looks like NovaMind falls into that camp. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however. Because the program converts topics and sub-topics to standard heading styles in Word (heading 1, heading Document Export Comparison Page 6 2, etc.), all you need to do is access Word’s “modify styles” menu and change the font, size, color and other properties of those styles to meet your needs. Word will then apply them to all instances of text that is formatted with that heading style. iMindMap 5 iMindMap has fully embraced the Microsoft Office 2010 style of toolbar, with a cascading File menu like the one seen at right. When you click on “export,” the program displays 10 different formats for sharing your work, including “PDF and document.” A new user may find this a bit confusing at first, because a PDF is a document type. Perhaps “PDF and Word document” would be more accurate and descriptive. The next step in the export process is to choose a template; iMindMap 5 provides three of them.

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