MindMaple Lite Editor's Review

Plan and increase work efficiency with this visual mind mapping tool.

Understanding how you learn and think is a key aspect of increasing not only your grades while in school, but to advancing your career after you graduate. Figuring this out isn't always the easiest thing to do; but if you find yourself either working well and retaining concepts and knowledge easier with flowcharts, illustrations or diagrams, then like me, you're a visual learner. If this is the case, then you're going to like MindMaple. It’s a visual planning and organization tool for Windows.

MindMaple increases your productivity by helping you visually organizing your thoughts and tasks. This concept, called mind mapping, can be used for things like project management, setting up personal schedules or plans. MindMaple allows you to draw or diagram your thoughts so you can visually "paint" or "draw" your thought process. Topics can also be placed anywhere on a page instead constraining you to a specific location on the page.  This allows you to piece things together as they come to you, connecting your thoughts when and where you feel makes the most sense.

Self-accountability is built in. MindMaple enables you to add start dates, due dates, priorities, completion ratios, durations and resources for each task. Task Information is visually displayed so that the task can be easily monitored. When you're all done, or if you need to distribute your map to others, you can export mapping results to other applications. MindMaple supports Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, as well as TXT, HTML and image files.

Pro’s: Visual planning, task and resource monitoring, export to MS Office

Con’s: Truly effective for visual learners and thinkers, Verbal thinkers may have issues adapting to the application paradigm

Conclusion: Mind mapping software isn't for everyone. Its effectiveness is only realized if your mind retains information visually. MindMaple fits into this paradigm nicely and the tools are easy to use.