More on Linux (so okay, not strictly relevant to outlining - perhaps)

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 30, 2013 at 06:10 PM

Franz Grieser wrote:
>Mindview as a hierarchical spreadsheet? I used it a few years ago as a
>tool for presentations and mind maps. Would you mind elaborating on how
>you use it as a spreadsheet? And why Mindview and not LibreOffice Calc?

Strictly speaking, MindView is a ‘classic’ mind mapping program. However, it allows one to add custom fields to nodes, and then perform calculations on those fields along the hierarchy.

So when I plan a project, I can simply make the work breakdown and add budget and resources on the actual tasks/deliverables. The advantage of this approach over any spreadsheet is that I can start with the info I have, and add detail along the way; i.e. if a task needs to be broken down into sub-tasks, all I need to do is add the subtask nodes and set the task resources as the sum of its subsidiaries.

I recently finished the financial reporting of a project. My starting point was the project mind map which I created two years ago. Along the way I have added detail, and now the finances are calculated directly from nodes that represent individual invoices—with the actual invoices as linked PDFs. If I am not interested in that detail, I just hide that level with one click.

I am sure it can all be done with a classic spreadsheet, but I find this far more convenient and less error-prone. In a spreadsheet, the formulas are hidden and you have to check them one by one. In a tree/mindmap structure, the formulas are visible—they are represented by the tree structure itself. Of course, the complexity of formulas you can create in a ‘real’ spreadsheet is far greater, but I don’t need that.

The first time I encountered this feature was in B-liner and at the time I loved it. But B-liner couldn’t export the calculation structure, which meant that I then had to re-do the budgets in Excel to share it with others. MindView exports to nicely formatted Excel. Note that I am still using MindView v.3 (it has recently reached version 5) which works fine in Windows 7 and I see no reason to upgrade.

I find it quite intriguing that the vast majority of outliners that we discuss here have no such customisable fields and, of those that do, very few can actually do calculations on them. In fact, I can only think of Natara Bonsai (but it only allows one custom numeric field); don’t know about MyInfo. It really seems like a lost opportunity. I have included it in the features of my ideal outliner http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/17338

I remember that, years ago, Freemind was developing ‘attributes’, i.e. custom metadata per node, including numerical fields. At the time I lost interest in Freemind because betas where taking forever and I found the custom field functionality quite awkward. I don’t know if the functionality ever made it to the stable release, nor whether it was ported to Freeplane, which I use for simple mind maps. I will check it out and report back.