Review - Mind Manager Version 7

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

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.