Get Rid of PowerPoint and Elevate Your Presentations using Mind Maps

Do you frequently make presentations to small and large groups using PowerPoint (PPT)? Do you wrestle with PPT to get the format just right and then discover that you need to reorder or shuffle the content around for more impact? Would you like spend less time formatting and spend more time on the actual composition of content? Well you can! Now you can focus on the content and not be wrestling with PowerPoint’s shortcomings. Let me explain how!

Develop your content right in MindManager V7 Pro (from Mindjet). If you are unfamiliar with Mind Maps you may want to review Tony Bussan’s book “The Mind Map Book”. I’ve been mind mapping for years now and will blog more about it in the coming months but for now here are some guidelines for developing your presentation mind maps that will ensure your audiences get the most from your presentations and allow you to spend 90% less time formatting and organizing your presentations.

The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain’s Untapped Potential

Background Color
When presenting in a large room using a projector, it’s important to make the presentation easy on the eyes. So set your background color to be very dark blue and avoid background images. I like full blue (.e.g., “0000FF”) myself. If you are in a small conference room you can use other colors and background images. However I’ve found the dark blue to be effective for any projection of Mind Maps.

Fonts
When using a dark background, make sure to set your font color to pure white. The better the contrast, the easier the presentation is on the audience’s eyes. For font families, the standard recommendation is to go with a plain sans-serif font like Arial. However one of the tricks in Mind Mapping to get the creative juices flowing is to use a variety of colors and styles. It helps the mind lateralize between the left and right brain. For smaller forums you can try a fun font like Kristen ITC, or stick with Arial…

Icons
Whenever you are creating mind maps you should use color, images, icons and more to keep your creativity flowing and stimulate the audience. Put icons in the topics like you would with maps you develop for yourself. Just make sure that you up the size a little so that they can be viewed from a distance. And don’t use overly complex icons. Think high color and complexity contrast.

Embedded Images
In MindManager you can paste images right into subtopics. I use a variety of tools to develop these images. My favorite is Visio but I also do screen captures and use other image tools as needed. Typically for Visio, PowerPoint and other drawing software I just select all and then copy the image right into the clipboard. Then go to MindManager and paste it into the subtopic. It really is that simple. This makes using drawings really easy. Once you paste the image into a MindManager subtopic you can resize it by dragging the image handles. Size the images to fit within the target screen resolution of your presentation projector.

Where it makes sense don’t forget to set the drawing background color to the same dark blue and make the lines white or very light to maintain the visual contrast for the audience.

Exposure your URLs
In MindManager you can create a hypertext link for any topic or subtopic. However the audience will only see the favicon icon or browser icon for that link in the map. If you want you audience to see the URL you should put the link both in as a hypertext attachment and as text right into the topic. Then during presentations the URL is visible and yet the map still has a clickable link for user’s getting a copy of the map.

Screen Resolution and Testing Presentation Mode
This is solid advice for any presentation tool you use: make sure that you view you Mind Map ahead of time using MindManager’s presentation mode and at the resolution of the projector. As you go though the subtopics you can resize the images, fonts and icons as needed. Always do a dry run through the presentation ahead of time.

Adjusting the size usually doesn’t take much time since MindManager has a zoom in/out feature for presentation mode. Play with MindManager until you are comfortable with presentation mode. My first group presentation went well and after that one event I was already very comfortable with presentation mode. You should be fine as well.

Hand-Out Copies
One of the benefits of Mind Mapping is that a large amount of information can be conveyed in a single map and represented using the most important relationships among the subtopics. And best of all, the information does not have to be presented in a fully linear mode. You can very easily move around from topic to topic as needed to satisfy the direction you want to take your audience. You can’t do that with PowerPoint… The downside is that there is no easy way to print out large maps and preserve the context that is implied in the map. For reasonably sized maps, you can format them to print in tabloid size (11in x 17in). For large maps there just is no way to print them out.

MindManager gives you many options, however, for exporting maps. I’ve been using web export, which allows me to build a mini-site and provide my audience with the URL to that site. You can export the map to PowerPoint as well if you want to spend the time formatting it. And you can always provide the original map file to the users so that they can use MindManager’s free viewer. I tend to provide both the original file and a mini-web site. In the next week I’ll post a comment to this blog post with the URL of my most recent presentation mini-site.

As you venture into MindManager for presentations, come back here and lets discuss how it is working for you….

Related Blogs and Sites
Mind Jets Home Page
MindManager Pro V7 Product Page
MindManager V7 Free Viewer
Mind Jet Blog
Creative Think Blog of Roger von Oech
The Student Tablet PC Blog
KnowledgeUser Blog

Look for many more posts on Mind Mapping, this indispensable approach to helping the creative process and dealing with information overload.

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