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Mind mapping - software

Sue Pertwee-Tyr

Accuphase all the way down
Hi, all providers of collective pfm wisdom. I have a project to complete for work which includes a 'landscape review' of a complex and interconnected area. I'm thinking of creating a mind map, or similar, to visualise and present my findings. I think I know what I want to be able to do, but haven't the first idea what software I might need or want to use. Is there anybody in the pfm hive mind with any experience of this sort of thing?

To give you an example of what I'd like to do, I'll use a musical equivalent to illustrate it, though this isn't the actual task:

Imagine you want to create a wide ranging survey of musical types and genres. So below the generic top-line 'bubble' called 'Music' (I'm imagining a sort of Venn diagram bubble, but not overlapping, but instead interconnected to 'sub-bubbles' which would become visible only as you scroll or zoom in). So, you'd have a few key genres, 'Classical', 'Jazz', 'Rock', 'Folk' etc, etc, in a series of bubbles connected back to the Music one.

Delving into 'Jazz', you'd then scroll/zoom in and see subgenres branching off that, like 'Trad', 'Bebop', 'Fusion', etc, etc. And zooming in on Fusion, say, you'd then branch off into Artists, so a veritable forest of bubbles, people like Chick Corea, Jaco Pastorius, etc. Scroll/zoom in again on those to see the albums, and zoom in again to see the fellow artistes performing on them. And those artistes would also be in the form of hyperlinks, back to their own entries on the map (and, maybe, a bit of metadata to show some key facts in a yellow box when you mouse over the link).

Is this do-able and, if so, is there software that allows people to do it, at modest expense (I can't install on my work machine, so would have to buy it myself and export the output).

As to the exporting, it'd have to export as a common file type, say .pdf. And it'd be helpful if it could input/import from a spreadsheet (we use Excel - Office 365).

Thanks for reading this far! Any suggestions?
 
Thanks both, I’ll check it out. I do suspect some of the functionality I might want would likely be disabled on free versions, and I wonder whether you’d noticed that?
 
I have used Mind Manager, found it quite good. It's paid for but I think you can do a 30 day trial.

Having said that the first time I did it, it would definitely have been quicker to do it on a bit of paper with a pencil, though that doesn't provide the 'presentation' you might be needing.
 
If you have Office and or Teams - you should be able to get Visio, its part of the family but is not is not installed as standard afaik. Visio has the tools you need for simple mind maps and I think is pretty easy to use.

Not having it myself now - for quick and dirty it is surprising what you can do in Word or Excel - a rather manual process and you you cannot create interactive zoom around types - but for a page of interconnected blocks it works. Word is rather limited to rectangular text boxes though.
 
you should be able to get Visio, its part of the family but is not is not installed as standard afaik.

i understand the licensing is going to change (certainly our corporate one is) and Visio (will) now cost more as an addon

Visio has the tools you need for simple mind maps and I think is pretty easy to use.

No Visio is a diagramming tool. There are other tools developed for mind mapping that are far better. Online ones are great for collab.
 


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