Missing Office application

To deal with the challenge of information overload, many people have been forced to spend a significant amount of time organising content into complicated folder structures, and more recently, collaborative tools. Despite many advances in this area, the fundamental problem remains that it is hugely difficult to access all of the required information when you're actually performing your work.

“Most of us will run projects on a regular basis, as part of our professional roles,” says Chris Harman, Regional Vice-President of Mindjet, a leading provider of collaborative work management solutions that dramatically improves how groups of people work together. “In doing so, we often have to deal with a multitude of Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and PowerPoint presentations.

“The challenge is to organise all of this information in a meaningful way, with the ideal situation being that any member of a team can simply pick up all of these files and start work from where others have left off.”

Harman maintains that the solution to these issues has, in a more basic form, been around for centuries: maps. This is what the team at Mindjet have been working on since its inception in 1991 - visualising information through software. In nearly two decades, the company has turned the humble map into a software program that is entirely integrated with Microsoft Office, capable of bringing every single document that users work on into one visual representation that can be collapsed, expanded, extended and reorganised with a simple click and drag. The “missing Office application” is MindManager.

The image shows the basic structure of a MindManager mind map. What it can't show is the amount of detail and Office integration that can be achieved within this simple, clean document.

Each branch can expand into sub-branches and each item can contain notes, attachments, links to Web pages or documents. In addition, a branch can contain tasks and project members. It's simple to assign tasks to a project member, link this to a series of files, and have this seamlessly create a task within their Outlook e-mail system.

MindManager also integrates with Office applications. From exporting maps into PowerPoint to creating a visual map of tasks and files within SharePoint with a simple click - everything needed for a project can be collected in one visual representation.

Losing context by switching between multiple applications just to make small edits also becomes a thing of the past, as Office files can be opened and edited within MindManager. It's also possible to browse SharePoint and other Web links in a side pane, while viewing your map on the same screen.

“In summary, MindManager is a piece of software that can unite all the information contained within your entire Office suite into one dynamic page. It is a simple, easy-to-use productivity tool that really works to help you get the most out of the programs you are already using,” Harman concludes.