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Export a MindManager Map to Microsoft Excel

ActivityOwner — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 18:23:46 +0000

Mind map users need to deal with the rest of the world, which lives in lists and spreadsheets. Even MindManager users themselves often have a need to look at their map context in a less graphical format for analysis or printing.

Map2Excel is a simple no-frills macro for exporting a map or portion of a map to Excel. It can be launched as a macro or using the new m2e GyroQ tag. If you select the central topic or nothing is selected, the whole map is exported; otherwise the children of the selected topic are exported.

The macro prompts the user as to whether to export the map in tabular format, with parent information for each child topic included in each row, or in outline format:

Tabular Format	Outline Format

UPDATE

This tool is now available as an MindManager add-in. For more information visit http://map2excel.com.

The Matrix

ActivityOwner — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 04:19:52 +0000

MindManager provides a great environment for group brainstorming on issues and ideas and for organizing information. While you may start out in an unstructured way, you will often find your final product has a 3-level deep structure such as in the Pro/Con analysis shown below.

In these cases it can be handy to convert this into a tabular format for sharing or review as shown below.

The tabular format can be particularly appealing to map-averse "list people".

The map2table macro can do this conversion quickly for you. The resulting html file can be shared on a web site or easily imported to Excel or Word. It creates the table by compiling a list of the main topics under the selected topic (usually the central topic) and then searching each branch to accumulate the 2nd dimension of the table. You have the choice to set the 1st layer topics as the row to column headings.

The tabular format is also useful when you want a new way to look at a custom ResultsManager dashboard like "Committed Projects and Next Actions" and assess the balance across your areas of responsibility (see earlier blog entry).

Note that the macro will capture a 4th level of detail by combining the text of the underlying topics into the title text of the table hyperlinks so they can be view if you hover on the entry. It also adds hyperlinks associated with the topics by default. More details are available on the macro's wiki page.

Map2Table — Export your map branches to a linked web page table

ActivityOwner — Wed, 23 May 2007 01:49:53 +0000

On Saturday morning I confronted my ResultsManager Daily Actions Plus dashboards in MindManager facing several dozens items in my @web, @home, @errand, @workpc context lists. The problem was I had the flexibility to be in almost any of these contexts at that moment.

The GTD approach in this situation is to fall back to (2) time available, (3) energy available, and (4) priority in order to make choices "in the moment". I would add "area of focus" to that list as the "soft context" of a situation (Saturday morning), needs to somehow trump the ready availability of @workpc.

What I was missing was the ability to easily see my task and project lists in multiple dimensions at once. Custom ResultsManager dashboards like Next Actions by Context and the Review dashboard can slice things up by Area and context, Priority and Area, etc. The problem is that if you have let your lists grow too "hot", they can be hard to review or print when fully expanded. Over time an additional "cringe factor" can develop that makes you inclined to avoid expanding certain branches.

So what did I do? — I guess I ended up in @blog and wrote a macro (map2table.mmbas) to export a 3 layer map branch (or map) to an html file. My focus in writing this was on ResultsManager dashboards, but it will work for any MindManager map where the structure translates well to a table (e.g. a pro vs. con list for a set of options). The simple example below illustrates how it works.

You start by selecting the parent of a 3 layer deep branch ("Next Actions" in this case).

You run the map2table.mmbas macro and it creates an html file with the same name and directory as the map and pops it up in Internet Explorer (optional). The column headers represent the set of topics present in the 1st layer of the branch. The right hand row labels list all the topics identified in the second layer of the branch. The entries in the third layer are sorted into their corresponding row and column:

The hyperlinks on third layer entries are retained. In the case of dashboards, these are back to underlying maps, but could be to external websites or linked maps if used with a conventional map.

I found this new viewpoint very useful. I began by running it on the "Next Actions" branch of the Daily Actions Plus dashboard to get a view of my next-actions by area and context. It immediately identified actions that were not associated with one of these dimensions. Context-free actions have a tendency to be "blobs".

I next went to several review dashboards to look at projects by area and priority as well as area vs. committed status and variations on these two themes. As an example I've uploaded a "Project Summary Template" and Area and context dashboard templates.

I found making use of this macro and viewing things in concise tables led to one of the more effective review sessions I've had in awhile. It was particularly helpful to see the relative sizes of my committed and someday projects lists by area and moving projects back and forth. Again this was nothing I couldn't do in a dashboard map, but the change in perspective was liberating. The hyperlinks in the table make it easy to jump back into underlying maps to update and adapt maps.