ConceptDraw MINDMAP v7: The Importance of Importing Slides

The Presentation Exchange Solution for ConceptDraw MINDMAP adds the capability to import Microsoft® PowerPoint® slideshows and display their contents as a mind map. To see how this feature can benefit you in your everyday work, consider a few possible scenarios…


Scenario 1: Proposal Review

A major proposal to your company includes a PowerPoint slide deck. Clicking through the whole presentation will take far too much time, and in the process you can lose or obscure its meaning. With Presentation Exchange and ConceptDraw MINDMAP, you can easily extract the content and see how it fits together in a single view.

Olga: The entire management team needs to review those proposal slides before the end of the week. I just glanced at the file and there are over 50 slides! There’s no way we’ll have time for all this.

Jeff: You know, ConceptDraw MINDMAP just added this great ability to import from PowerPoint. We can just import that presentation into a mind map, and then distribute the map to our management team for review. You will save them so much time and headache; you might just get a promotion!

Olga: Brilliant, Jeff! You keep this up and you might just get that promotion.

Scenario 2: Presentation Revision

You have to give an important presentation to the Board of Directors on Friday. They picked apart the last presentation you gave, saying it was poorly organized and hard to follow. They felt you needed to do a better job of supporting your critical points. Why not try looking at your presentation in a new way: as a mind map?

Mary: I have to give the most important presentation of my life to the Board of Directors on Friday! And the last time I was in front of them, they were less then pleased.

Ignacio: I heard about how you went down in flames; it wasn’t a pretty sight. How about when you have the presentation completed, you import it into ConceptDraw MINDMAP? In a single view you can look over your slide content, see how the slides support one another, refine the story – the end result is that you’ll look much more professional.

Mary: Ignacio, you are a life saver! I never thought of doing that.

Scenario 3: Academia

The professor for your class has distributed slide presentations that contain lots of study content. Your challenge is to incorporate all the class materials to better leverage your study time. With Presentation Exchange, you can easily pull all that content into a mind map that illustrates the relationships between study topics.

Oscar: I think am going to fail the midterm tomorrow for our Supply Chain class. I’ve been studying from the PowerPoint slides the professor gave me, but it’s taking so long just to get organized. There are extensive notes on every slide! Thinking about it, I just know I am going to flunk that midterm. There’s not enough time left!

Elizabeth: The test for that class is going to be so easy. I finished studying for it yesterday.

Oscar: Yesterday?! How did you manage that?

Elizabeth: I have this cool program called ConceptDraw MINDMAP. I just imported the PowerPoint slides and all of the content appears in a mind map. It makes it super easy to organize. It brings all the notes from the slides in and everything. Then I can add more notes and even hyperlink to a web page or a supporting document. It cut my study time in half. It’s almost like magic!

Oscar: Oh man, that sounds great! I’d better go download it right away.

The Tip of the Iceberg

These are a just a few scenarios we imagined for how the Presentation Exchange Solution can make your daily life and work easier. How will YOU use it? Let us know via email to amersales@csodessa.com (Rest of World sales@csodessa.com, or follow us on Twitter @ConceptDraw.

21 day free trials of ConceptDraw MINDMAP, Presentation Exchange Solution, and all ConceptDraw products are available on ConceptDraw.com.

Collaboration with ConceptDraw

Using ConceptDraw Products
When You Collaborate

Our users often ask about how to share the work they’ve produced with ConceptDraw products, so we put together this summary of some options for using ConceptDraw in collaboration with others.


If your collaborators don’t use ConceptDraw

For displaying content such as a drawing or mind map, simply export to your preferred graphics format, and then send via email or instant message (Skype, Google chat, etc.). To allow others to work with and make changes to your data, ConceptDraw products can export to a variety of file formats that other programs can edit. For example, ConceptDraw MINDMAP can export to Mindjet® MindManager® files, and ConceptDraw PROJECT and ConceptDraw PRO can export to Microsoft® XML files, which are compatible with MS Project® and Visio® (respectively).

Email

If your collaborators do use ConceptDraw, the most straightforward method for sharing your ConceptDraw files is via email. ConceptDraw saved files are typically very modest in size and easily fall within the acceptable limits for attachment size of most email clients and services.

Instant Messaging

Furthermore, most instant messaging protocols (like Skype®, Google® Chat, etc.) allow peer-to-peer file transfers. The manageable size of ConceptDraw files allows them to be rapidly transmitted that way.

Google Documents

The advent of cloud computing has brought about numerous free online document management systems, such as Google Documents (http://docs.google.com). This type of service is a fast and easy way to collaborate. After registering an account (usually requiring only a valid email address), you can upload your files, set permissions for who can view and download, and then notify your colleagues via email that you’ve shared with them.

Dropbox

Another great free virtualization service now available is called Dropbox. Visit Dropbox.com to sign up for an account and download the small application. Thereafter, files saved in your Dropbox can be accessed from any computer or mobile device. You can share folders in your Dropbox with others, allowing them access to your files as well. This is a powerful and flexible way to have multiple users collaborating on a single file.

SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint® is a content management system for enterprise. Among its many uses are powerful document management tools that manage versioning, and allow administrators to set various levels of read and write permissions. SharePoint utilizes an innovative system of “checking out” documents that assures that a file can only be edited by a single user at a time. There is a common misconception that SharePoint can only be used with files created by other Microsoft software, when in fact it can be used to manage sharing and versioning of all kinds of files.

Screencasting

Sharing your screen with a colleague over the web is another great way to use ConceptDraw cooperatively. By utilizing services like Citrix® GoToMeeting®, Skype, or TechSmith® Jing®, you can collaborate live regardless of distance. ConceptDraw MINDMAP is great in this arena for managing meetings and taking notes, or presenting a mind map. You may even turn some of your colleagues onto increasing their productivity with ConceptDraw!

Conclusion

There’s no shortage of options for employing ConceptDraw products in a collaborative environment, whether your colleagues also use them or not. The variety of export options and manageable file size make displaying your work, or transferring it to another location a breeze. Using ConceptDraw in a live setting, via screencast, brings its innovative meeting-streamlining capabilities onto the web and around the globe. No matter the setting, ConceptDraw is the key to unlocking your creativity, streamlining your workflow, and increasing your productivity.

Project Reporting Using ConceptDraw MINDMAP and Microsoft PowerPoint

The ConceptDraw Office Suite has a very powerful built in project reporting tool that generates a variety of reports. Such reports range from visual scoreboards to mind maps reports that show the critical details.

Figure 1: Map template for Report Presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint.

For those of you looking for a way to quickly prepare a PowerPoint presentation for status meetings, you can easily prepare your content in a mind map format, and then export to your template of choice using ConceptDraw MINDMAP.

Figure 2: Sample of PowerPoint output using a ConceptDraw template.

Download a sample ConceptDraw MINDMAP template here:

http://www.mindmappedia.com/?id=160786010

Porter's Five Forces in a ConceptDraw Mind Map

Porter's Five Forces in a Mind Map

Like analysis tools? How about a mind map template for Porter’s Five Forces which is often used for industry analysis?

I have placed a ConceptDraw MINDMAP template here http://www.mindmappedia.com/?id=113810816 for anyone to download that is setup to help you capture and display your data using Porter’s Five Forces. I placed a small example in the same map on page two so you are able to see how to build the map. I used Ford Motor Company as my example and I would like to place a disclaimer here that I am not an automotive industry expert, but built it to show how the data could be structured and displayed.

One other benefit from this map is that when you use this template and get it setup for your industry it exports really well into a PowerPoint slide presentation using the ppt outline mode export. I find this very handy for presenting observed results.