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Idea structuring software |
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Giving structure to ideas helps do everything from help draw them together in collective categories to making a collection of information and ideas easier to absorb and memorize. This can either be done simply by putting each idea on a separate, moveable object (for easy restructuring) - what we've chosen to call idea bubbles - or by using a cognitive map - a visual representation of thoughts. The best known form of cognitive map is the Mind Map®, devised by British creativity guru Tony Buzan. (If you'd like to hear about Mind Maps from the horse's mouth, see Buzan's short video introduction). Such maps can be drawn by hand, but often there is an advantage to be had from putting them together electronically. A computer-based map can be automatically rebalanced as you add new information, and restructured using simple drag and drop techniques. Of course you don't need to use software for this. A hand-drawn mindmap is often fine, as is using Post-it notes to rearrange and structure ideas. But often software can help, whether it's to make restructuring more practical or to ensure that the final results are better presented. We compare: Mind mappers Different approaches Idea bubbles ... and put forward our recommendations in our conclusion. ® Mind Map is registered trade
mark of Tony Buzan. |
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MindManager has the support of the inventor of the term Mind Map, the great popularizer of the concept mapping approach, Tony Buzan. It's a professional piece of software with a comparable feel both in solidity and usability to Microsoft Office, and featuring good support for producing excellent looking graphical maps. These can be exported to a wide range of formats from JPG to RTF and HTML. One of the great features of MindManager is the excellent range of built-in pictures and icons for enhancing your mind maps. Compared with VisiMap, MindManager produces more attractive maps and has much more powerful options for generating new ideas and for monitoring projects and linking to Office. However, VisiMap still has the edge on the speed with which information can be pumped into it, making it more practical for brain dumps. MindManager has recently been updated to version 7. This is by far the slickest piece of mind mapping software on the market. It just looks and feels like part of the Office family, and the on-screen graphics are superbly professional. It has very strong interaction with the Office products, some of it (for instance embedding little spreadsheets), very impressive. The biggest shame is that they've bothered to put interaction with the rather obscure drawing package, Visio, but they still haven't with Office's best kept secret weapon, OneNote. A strong interaction between OneNote with its powerful note-taking capabilities and MindManager would have been superb. Next version, perhaps! (I did say this with version 6, so don't hold your breath.) If you are new to MindManager and want a solid, quality piece of mind mapping software, this has to be the best choice of anything on the market. Anyone with version 5 or older should also definitely upgrade. Whether to go for the new version if you have version 6 is a more difficult decision. The big deciding factor has to be your attitude to the Ribbon user interface - the fancy new bar you'll find at the top of the 2007 versions of the main Microsoft Office products. It does take a little effort to get used to it, but if you like it once you do (I find it significantly more process oriented, so easier to get things done; others hate it), then it's worth bringing your copy of MindManager in line. If you don't like it, then it's probably best to stay away. There are other features in the new version - more flexibility on queries, views etc., but it's unlikely you will feel the need to upgrade unless you are a fan of the Ribbon. MindManager comes in two main versions, Basic and Pro. The main advantages of the Pro version are enhanced interaction with other Office products and collaboration features. Overall we'd say that with Version 6, MindManager became our favourite mind mapping software. It has retained that crown with Version 7. VisiMap still has the edge for a quick dump of information, but for anything else we'd go for MindManager. For information on MindManager, please see the MindJet site (US www.mindjet.com, UK www.mindjet.co.uk) for more information. Download now Please note that Creativity Unleashed neither sells nor supports this software: we are merely reviewing it and providing a link. Any queries to Mindjet. There are 21 day free trial versions of MindManager Basic, MindManager Pro and a free MindManager Viewer available from the Mindjet site. Click here for US information and here for UK information.
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MindGenius is the newest of the mapping products and brings some fresh ideas to the business of cognitive mapping, plus strong links to Microsoft Office products. A full-featured, professional product, it has a great deal of flexibility, but also keeps the basics very simple. Well worth trying out to see if this is the best product for you. Now available in 2005 version with:
Perhaps the biggest advantage of MindGenius is very low pricing compared with MndManager, especially with the home licence. Download now Click here to find out more, to download a trial, or to buy MindGenius. There is a 21 day free trial - after reaching their site, click on Enter, then one of the four coloured "market" areas. You will now see an option to download. Please note that Creativity Unleashed neither sells nor supports this software: we are merely reviewing it and providing a link. Any queries to MindGenius.
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There was a time when Visimap was rather low tech - only handling old style Windows filenames, crude in its capabilities. With the new Version 4 in November 2003, it is all changed. Visimap is still the most text-oriented of the mind map products. It's great to just pour text into - and it doesn't produce such visually pretty maps as the rest. BUT - and it's a big but - the flexibility of the new version is just as impressive as the use of Office style toolbars and such. Want to export your map as a graphic, or a set of Outlook tasks, or a Word outline, or a PowerPoint presentation - no sweat, it's just one click away from the toolbar. We've always used Visimap for tasks that are largely text oriented, and this new version is a huge improvement on the previous one. Well worth a try. Download now Visimap is available for download in a trial version with the vast majority of the functionality intact - see the Visimap site for more information on the product. Please note that Creativity Unleashed neither sells nor supports this software: we are merely reviewing it and providing a link. Any queries to Visimap. |
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ConceptDraw Mind Map is a very versatile piece of mind mapping software with strong graphical capabilities. It is probably the most complex of the recommended products when it comes to putting basic text in, but has the huge advantage for some users of being the only mind mapping software that comes in a Mac version. Key features include:
Advantages of Professional edition:
New - now version 3.0 with better brainstorming, interface and faster operation with large maps. Download now ConceptDraw Mind Map has a free demonstration version that you can find out more about and download by clicking here. Please note that Creativity Unleashed neither sells nor supports this software: we are merely reviewing it and providing a link. Any queries to Conceptdraw. |
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You can't really beat a free product when it comes to value for money! Freemind is a Java-based mind mapping package available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is relatively basic, but has a surprising amount of functionality considering it is free. It is also reasonably quick, overcoming the failing of some Java-based software. Perhaps the least obvious thing with Freemind is how to get started. It opens into a blank screen, rather than any starting page, but once you've selected New from the File menu you are presented with a starting blob for the centre of the map. This is named by typing into it. Then it's simply a matter of using the Insert key (or the lightbulb button) to add a new item, or pressing Enter to add a new item at the same level. Items can be put in a "cloud", and dragging a web page from a browser sets up a click and navigate link. There are also exports to PDF and the obscure scalable vector graphics format as well as the likes of HTML, JPEG and PNG. Printing from the program itself is a little basic, but it works. Maps are self balancing - you can't drag items to change the shape, though you can drag and drop branches from one place to another. The "fit to window" view, so essential on a mind map, is a little messy, moving the map to the top of the screen rather than the centre. Freemind also has a "folding" feature that basically means you can hide levels as in an outliner. The publisher makes a big thing of this, but to be honest it misunderstands the point of mind map - you shouldn't have hidden levels. Overall, while it certainly can't compete head to head with the commercial products, it does the job in a simple, usable way and makes a great introduction to using mind maps on the computer that can be undertaken with no financial risk. That can't be bad. Download now Freemind is free to download from the Freemind page |
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It might seem at first sight that an information organizer based on a filing drawer/folders/documents metaphor is yawn making - but don't know it until you've tried it: OneNote 2003 is the hidden gem in the Microsoft Office portfolio - it's just a superb way of capturing and structuring information. Each page within OneNote can hold a bewildering mix of information. You can click anywhere on the page and just type. You can drop in photos, links to websites and files, or complete web pages. You can write and draw anywhere on the screen (particularly useful if you have a tablet PC, but we've used OneNote for a while on an ordinary desktop PC and it still works very well). And, particularly cleverly, if you use OneNote to take audio notes - say in a meeting - then when you play back those audio notes, any text you typed at the same time is highlighted as you get to the appropriate point in the audio - this is truly neat. Oh, and there's no need to save - OneNote does so as you go along. Interaction with other packages is good too. Drag some text from Internet Explorer, and OneNote automatically labels it with a hot link back to the website. You can set up Outlook meetings and contact details from within OneNote too. And a couple of free add-ins from the Microsoft site make OneNote even more effective. With these you can send information direct from Internet Explorer or Outlook into a OneNote page. Searching across the whole collection of information is easy and effective, and there are very flexible checkbox "note flags" which can be in different visual forms, and which can be collected together in a single place to keep an eye on what you should be doing. Being a Microsoft product, OneNote is very slick, well finished and professional, but there are some limitations. It would be great to be able to put in a link from one place within OneNote to another, but you can't. And it would also be useful to have views onto a piece of information on one page from another page. Even so this is a very powerful way of organizing information if the structure appeals. A mind map based system is great for brainstorming or presenting information, but we find OneNote much better for collecting and storing information for future use. And at just $79.99 (£70.97 in the UK) it's very good value for money too. Buy/see more information now OneNote 2003 is available from Amazon:
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It's always good to see a different approach to keep notes and structuring ideas. PMM works rather like having multiple sets of Post-it notes, each of which can hold a basic idea and accompanying text, which can be stuck all over different sheets of paper. Of itself that wouldn't be enough to provide idea structuring, but PMM allows you to link different notes using simple web-like link lines, which can represent different relationships - either those provided by your software, or your own. What makes this more flexible is that a note can appear on any number of sheets, so you can have different cuts on your data. Notes can also carry images as well as text, and can have attachments in the form of links to external files or web pages. Altogether this is a simple but quite elegant solution to capturing and structuring information. It's also good value for money - just $64. However, there are a few downsides. The interface isn't always the most obvious, and you have to go into dialog boxes to do anything (e.g. type text into a note, access an attachment), which is rather clumsy. There is no facility to tidy up a diagram or fit it to a particular sized window. Printing has few options and there's no way to import/export to or from obvious products like Word. Although it's great to be able to use images it only works with .BMP files, not the more common .JPG - and you can't have a note that's part text and part picture - they are always overlaid one on the other, which means the text tends to get lost. However, PMM's limitations don't necessarily get in the way of its effectiveness for storing and organizing information. As always with these products, it's what fits best with your personal way of working that's ideal, so it's well worth giving PMM a try. Download now PMM is available as a free trial with limited number of sheets/notes from the PMM website.
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GyroQ
I've labelled GyroQ as "something different" to a mind mapper, which it is, but I ought to stress up front that it only works with Mind Manager, so needs to be considered alongside that. If you already use Microsoft's OneNote, you may find GyroQ unnecessary, as OneNote provides a more comprehensive way of handling quick notes and much more. GyroQ is a tiny piece of software that lurks in the Windows toolbar. Click the icon and up pops the window above. Type in a thought you want to capture and press Enter or click Add and it disappears, not into the ether, but into a Mind Manager mind map, waiting to be accessed as and when you want. At its most basic, that's all there is to it. GyroQ lets you capture ideas as and when they come up, and slip them out of the way for future reference. This makes a huge amount of time management sense. If you are concentrating on a task, then it's all too easy to be distracted by new ideas, phone calls and the like. Whenever you get an interruption to what you are doing, just hit GyroQ, the window pops instantly, type in a reminder and send it away. When it suits you, click the "Send Queue" button. This sends any ideas you have queueing up to Mind Manager, opening up a "GyroQ Daily Capture" mind map, which structures your ideas by date you had them. You can then do what you like with them - restructure them, start new mind maps from them, just throw them away - whatever you need to get some benefit from that thought. Two things I particularly liked about GyroQ where its immediate response - no waiting for it to pop up - and the tag feature. By default, when you type something in it's labelled as an idea, but if you click the Tag button you can cycle through a number of options for classifying it. Initially these are "action item" coloured red, and the very clever "information" item, coloured green, which takes anything you've got in the clipboard along with it into the mind map. Extra tags can be downloaded from Gyronix's site, or with the developer edition you can produce your own. Download now Gyronix provide a 15 day free trial option for GyroQ - click here to go their site. You will be offered either a straight download, or to "accept our invitation and get a download". Please use the "accept an invitation" option, which registers that you were invited to do so by Creativity Unleashed, if you don't mind - but if you would prefer them not to know who referred you, use the "just a download" option.
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The Creative Thinker is the first of the 'idea bubble' products we compare. To start with it's a little baffling. The 'friendly' bee cursor with flapping wings soon becomes an irritating distraction. But if you persevere you will discover a powerful tool for brainstorming ideas onto hexagons, the rearranging them into structures, to which you can add arrows etc to define processes and relationships. There's a rather crude brainstorm mode for getting things into hexagons quickly, an 'oblique thoughts' database of random inspirations (often a little twee) and good connectivity between models and to external applications. There are lots of examples provided, which with patience will give you a good idea of the power of this application. There does not appear to be a downloadable trial version of The Creative Thinker, but you can order online from their site. Please note that Creativity Unleashed neither sells nor supports this software: we are merely reviewing it and providing a link. |
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You could be forgiven for thinking you were suffering from deja vu when comparing Visual Concepts with The Creative Thinker (though in the example above VC is using circles, it still has a fondness for hexagons). It also allows you to pour ideas into shapes and then structure them. However, it is significantly easier to get your ideas in with this product, and it is better at easy manipulation. Perhaps some aspects of final presentation aren't as good as in the Creative Thinker though. Download now Visual Concepts has a free trial download version, or you can go for the full thing from the website. You might have to hunt a little for the 'Creative Thinking Software' label on that busy front page. Please note that Creativity Unleashed neither sells nor supports this software: we are merely reviewing it and providing a link. |
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There are plenty of good idea structuring packages on the market - to stand out, a program needs some unique features. Spark-Space certainly has some of these, but there are significant doubts as to whether or not they are enough to justify buying it. Spark-Space sits somewhere between flowchart software and idea bubble type software. It's certainly not a mind map product and doesn't pretend to be. Each idea is entered in a blob, either by clicking on the workspace or just pressing enter in the special fast entry mode. These blobs can be linked using link lines. Things get a bit more interesting when you start to give ideas visual identities. The cow in the picture comes from the clipart with Spark-Space, or the more artistic among us can design their own. Any of the ideas can also have associated notes - double clicking an idea brings up an associated window with a simple word processor. There is also text to speech to read out the text. By exporting to (say) a Word format, these associated notes can be pulled together into a structured document. Another of Spark-Space's little tricks is being able to rotate the workspace in three dimensions. This is quite fun to play with, but I'm not quite sure what use it is. It does mean that you can put some ideas in the background and they get smaller with perspective, but you can't move ideas out of the plane, so it's a 2D idea space in a 3D model. One useful advantage of Spark-Space in multi-environment businesses is that it works on the PC, Mac and Linux operating systems. Although Spark-Space is cute, it doesn't have the polished feel of some of the other idea structuring packages and at £300 for the professional version (£99 basic) it's nowhere near as cheap you might hope. In fact, when you compare it with £199 for the Pro version of Mind Manager (or nothing for FreeMind), it's very poor value for money. Spark-Space seems more aimed at the academic market - as a business tool it's hard to see why you would want to use it rather than one of the competitors. Download now Don't take our word for it, though! You can download a free trial copy of Spark-Space from the website www.spark-space.com |
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This is a decidedly non-trivial tool that is not only suitable for collecting and arranging ideas but also exploring the possibilities in decision structures and flows. It was designed by a University department, and frankly that shows a bit - it's rather more technical and difficult to use than it needs be - however there is no doubting its power if the complexities are suitable for your requirement. Any of the other products are better at simple idea capturing and structuring (and they are mostly cheaper), but Decision Explorer comes into its own when you want to explore dependencies and relationships in a decision process. Download now See the Decision Explorer site for more information. There is a free trial download, but it's cunningly hidden well down the right hand column! Please note that Creativity Unleashed neither sells nor supports this software: we are merely reviewing it and providing a link.
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Mind Pad is a piece of software for producing concept maps - visual representations of information, structures and processes. It's a strange mix of simple and complex. In terms of user hand-holding and supported processes it's a very simple product. All it provides is the ability to draw shapes and to link them. There are no wizards to help you input the data, no way to export and import, nothing designed to support the creative process. However, and it's a big however for programmer types, Mind Pad's objects are very flexible. You can add all sorts of information to a box, for instance (in the provided contact map example, each box can have a full list of contact fields like phone number, email etc). You can design your own objects and fit them into your maps. But the whole thing feels very programmer-oriented. It uses terms like "Select frame class" (actually "classs" in the version we've got) which are meaningless to normal human beings, and there's really no point trying to design objects unless you are familiar with object oriented programming. There are a couple of other problems. The software only works with something called Microsoft .NET Framework. If you don't already have this (and many won't) it's a 23 Mb download on top of the program itself. But rather more of concern is the way the term "mind maps" is used throughout the software and the website. Mind maps are a very specific type of concept map, particularly useful for note taking and arranging information in a human-absorbable form. The key feature of a mind map is that they grow tree-like from a central point, and the information is written on the branches. Mind Pad's maps are NOT mind maps. This isn't just trivial semantics - they work in a different way and provide a totally different effect. It isn't all bad. If you want concept mapping with the programmer-flexibility this application provides it is totally unrivalled. But don't be fooled into thinking it's a mind mapping product for the average user, because it isn't. If you want to compare this product with some real mind mapping software see our idea structuring page. Download now Mind Pad is available for download on a 30 day free trial from the Mind Pad website. Please note that Creativity Unleashed neither sells nor supports this software: we are merely reviewing it and providing a link.
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A first decision is which style to go for. This really is a matter of what works best for you. If possible try out several of these products to make sure that you go with what really works for you. We happen to prefer mind maps for brainstorms and presenting information, and OneNote for collecting, structuring and retrieving information. One circumstance where idea bubbles probably have the edge is in green field thinking where you have no idea what it is that you are aiming for. The initial lack of structure is then a help, and the structure emerges later. Mind maps have to be given some form of structure as you go - though of course they can (especially in an electronic form) be radically restructured later. Of the mind mappers, we recommend five products - MindManager, MindGenius (formerly Ygnius), ConceptDraw MindMap, VisiMap and Freemind. Freemind is a good way to start, as it's free and will give you a feel for mind mapping on a computer before, perhaps, upgrading to one of the more sophisticated products It's also the only one available for Linux. Of the commercial products, VisiMap is the simplest and is very quick to use. In the latest version it is brought firmly up-to-date, making it the best for quick dumping text-oriented tasks. For many other uses, particularly if you want to share information with Microsoft Office products and for a superbly slick look, MindManager has the edge. ConceptDraw is the most complex of the high graphics systems when it comes to ease of inputting a map, but is unique among the commercial software in being available for Mac as well as Windows. MindGenius is worth trying alongside MindManager, as it also has good looks and excellent Office integration, but is much more affordable, especially at the budget "home" price. We'd suggest giving Freemind a try, then also trying out VisiMap if you're only worried about text, and want speed of entry, Mind Manager for general graphical use, MindGenius if good links to MS Office are important and ConceptDraw if you use Macs or a mix of Macs and Windows. OneNote rather stands alone, but we do very much recommend it for collecting information together, organizing it in projects and retrieving it. Often we use a mind map from one of the pieces of software above embedded in a OneNote page as a starting point for web research or further building of a project. GyroQ can provide some of OneNote's ability to quickly capture an idea, but then feeds it into a Mind Manager mind map. GyroQ is great if you make heavy use of Mind Manager for storing your ideas and plans, but is very, very simplistic - ideally try OneNote and GyroQ+Mind Manager to see which works best for you, but for us OneNote is unrivalled in this aspect of project-based note taking. Of the idea bubblers, there are a lot of similarities between The Creative Thinker and Visual Concepts, both using hexagons to represent and group ideas. Visual Concepts has the better user interface and spellchecker and is probably better for sheer practical use; the Creative Thinker has better extra graphics (arrows, text boxes etc.) and better external linking, so is the one to go for if you want the best presentation of the final result or to build complex interactive models. Spark-Space uses ideas of any shape and has good clipart (and 3D views) and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux: it is quite effective, if sometimes a little clumsy, but it is very expensive for what it does. Decision Explorer is a rather different beast, which we can only really recommend if you need its very special capabilities or are a decision support professional. Mind Pad (which is definitely in this category, despite describing itself as mind mapping) has some similarities to Decision Explorer, but is much simpler with less modelling features, and has very tailorable objects if you are a programmer. Go for Mind Pad if you want to build custom objects with different properties and link them together in a simple concept map. If you would like some advice on how best to use mind mapping software, click here to see more details of Chuck Frey's interesting e-book, Power Tips & Strategies for Mind Mapping Software.
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Creativity Unleashed Limited 2006 |
