On your free disc
This month’s disc is aimed at saving you precious hours during your working day. We’ve also included three full programs, the first of which is ConceptDraw MindMap 5. Here we tell you how to get started in mind-mapping.
The idea behind ConceptDraw MindMap is to help you organize and plan idea development. It is designed to work alongside other programs such as Microsoft Office Word and Office PowerPoint for seamless integration with your office set-up. Although it is initially aimed at business development, this program is also perfect for planning weddings, an essay or even a holiday.
The program itself has some very handy features. As with most software, there’s a handy ‘get started’ wizard to point you in the right direction. With any project, an initial ideas session is needed, and the Brainstorming function is very simple to use – just type in the topic and add ideas. Once you’ve got these, you can enter the main interface by clicking Finish Brainstorming. Your mindmap won’t look very special at the moment, so there are few tweaks you’ll need to make. All the entries you added appear as Subtopics, but you may need them to appear as Main topics. Simply highlight the entry you wish to convert, select the Topic menu and then select Topic Outdent. If you wish to add new Main topic, highlight the main idea and press Enter. A new Main topic appears and all you need to do is rename it. And here’s a quick tip: to convert multiple Subtopics, simply shift-click on each one and you will notice they are all highlighted. Then follow the same steps as before,
Once your ideas are complete, you can make the map more coherent by changing the Theme, adding symbols for reference and auto-arranging the map. In the right-hand toolbar you can have different tabs su
