ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY BLOG | INVENTIONS FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

I for one am having a great deal of fun experimenting with the new Export as Mindjet Player feature that can be found in MindManager 8. I have begun to export all of my MindManager maps to this format so that I can share them with my students on their Blackboard accounts. I have all of my lectures mapped out with links to web sites which I use for every class. Back in the days of MindManager 7, I would export my MindManager maps to PDF and post them to Blackboard, but the links were no longer live which always presented a problem. Now with the new Export as Mindjet Player I can put the maps on Blackboard and ask my students to open it and they can quickly jump from web site to web site as we talk about different topics. This has been a tremendous time saver for me. If you have taught using the internet- it is cumbersome when you have to stop and write the URL on the board and invariably some of your students are going to misspell the link and have trouble getting to where you want them to be.

One of the limitation of the first release of Export as Mindjet Player is that you can not embed your attachments. After thinking about this for a little while, I realized that while you can't attach documents that are stored on your computer, however, what about your documents that are stored on Google Docs or Acrobat.com? Instead of attaching documents to my MindManager maps I could simply hyperlink them to my documents. Yes- this does limit the number of attachments but it gets the job done. It was certainly worth trying and in fact my solution does work. Here is how to do it. In Google Docs open up your document that you want to be able to share and click the Share tab and select Publish as Web page. This will automatically create a unique URL that you can share with other to access your Google Docs. Now just create a link in Mindjet MindManager with that unique URL and you are ready to go. Remember you can also upload your Microsoft Word documents and bring them into Google Docs and be able to accomplish the same thing.

I have been using Acrobat.com for a lot of the consulting work that I am doing and it is just as easy to link your documents (Word, Excel, PDF's, etc) in your Acrobat.com account to your MindManager 8 maps and then Export as Mindjet Player and retain the attachments. In fact you will find the process a lot easier. Once you go to the MyFiles directory- simply select the file you want to link and make sure that you have selected Open Access which will let you share your files with others. Now simply click on the Copy URL button. Once you are back in MindManager 8 select the topic you want to link it to and bring up the Add Hyperlink and paste the link in. Now when you Export as Mindjet Player you will be able to access your documents from anywhere when you are connected to the internet.

While I hope that at some point in time we will be able to attach documents that can be embedded into the Mindjet Player for now this is a workaround that should serve us well for maps that we would like to share with others. Let me know what you think of this strategy. You can preview the file that I created by clicking here.