Looking for presentation development and delivery best practices

Chuck Frey has prepared a short guide to exporting from MindManager and other mindmapping programs to PowerPoint here: http://mindmappingsoftwareblog.com/wp...

While his comments relate to MM9 for Windows, they are generally applicable to MM2012.

There is two caveats to his summary. First, the issue he identifies regarding the small size of topics within MindManager presentations doesn't seem to problematic in my limited experience of using MM2012 for presentations, but in any case you are probably better off using MM's Walkthrough facility for this.

Second, while Chuck is right to criticise the poor outcome if you outcome as PowerPoint Objects which results in black text on dark blue blocky shapes, this is partly due to this being the default shape in the standard PowerPoint template. You can rectify this either by modifying the default shape within the standard PowerPoint template or applying a different template with an edited default shape during the MindManager PowerPoint export process.

@Alexsg - thanks for sharing the link to the guide.

Thanks Chris.

You probably worked it out, but the first line of the last paragraph should read "...the poor outcome if you export as PowerPoint Objects..."

One thing I still haven't discovered if you export as PowerPoint Objects is how to change the shape of the default object shape in PowerPoint, if you catch my meaning. I can change the colour and other characteristics of the shape, but not change it from a rectangle to one, say, with rounded corners to be like the default topic shapes in MM.

In any case you are probably better off using the alternative of exporting to Outlook as an outline using bullet points. This results in plain black text on a white background, or whatever is the default for the PowerPoint that you apply, which you can then format. This is the method I mostly use.

Also have a look around this forum as a few people have posted advice on using MM slides and exporting to PowerPoint. These are two tips which I have posted:

(1) If you want the image of the MM topics themselves to appear in the PowerPoint presentation, set up the topic and use the snipping tool in Vista or Windows 7 to take a snapshot of the page and paste that in the PowerPoint slide. You can either do this with topics in the map itself, or set up slides in MM and take snapshots of each of these.

(2) If you create a slide in MM for a topic with lots of sub-topics that extend past the top and bottom borders of the slide frame you will find that those topics won't appear in the MM slide show or be exported to PowerPoint.

Frustratingly while you can move the slide frame there is no way to resize the slide frame to include more subtopics, but there is a workaround. You can create multiple slides for the same topic, moving the slide frame each time so that the first slide shows, for example, the top half of the set of subtopics and the second the bottom set. When the slides are exported to PowerPoint the presentation will include both slides, each reflecting what was included in the original MM slide frame.