Text 2 Mindmap is a web-based app that lets you take text and convert it into a visual map. You can use it right from the home page without a login, but they also provide options for you to save your content on the site.
This review is part of the Visual Mapping Review Series 2014.
Texrt 2 Mindmap Review
YouTube link (4:57)
Video Highlights:
01:38 – What I like about Text 2 Mindmap
02:41 – Frustration points
03:53 – Overall impressions
Transcription:
Text 2 Mindmap is a pretty simple and straightforward web site that lets you create visual maps. I'm going to show you how it works. It's simple to use, and I'm going to give you a quick run-through.
Hey everyone, it's Kevin. Today I want to talk about is a website out there called Text 2 Mindmap. What it does, is it lets you take information and lets you paste it in. It takes the information you've got. It needs to be in a tabbed document. It converts it into a visual map. I'm going to show you an example.
I'm going to go in somewhere else where I've got a tabbed document, and we'll head back over to to Text 2 Mindmap. I can delete this. I'm going to paste in my new stuff. Then I'm going to head down to where it says Draw Mindmap, and throw it in.
I'm going to share some of the things I liked about Text 2 Mindmap and some of the things I think are frustration points, and I'm going to give you my overall impression. Let's have a quick look.
First of all, I want to give you an idea of who I am. I am the author of Visual Productivity, which pretty cool eBook out there. I'm also the creator of the XMind Cheat Sheet, so if you're into XMind, obviously that's gonna be something you might want to check out. And I train people how to use visual maps. I think it's an awesome job, and I enjoyed doing.
What I like:
Let's talk about some of the things I like about to Text 2 Mindmap. There are a few things that I think are really cool.
One is that it just works. It works on the front page. I don't have to sign in, I don't have to give my email to use it, but if I want to save a document, they do prompt you for your email. That's partly to hook you and get you back, but also to make sure that when come back they'll have your documents ready for you.
It also has dynamic movement, and what I mean by dynamic movement is when I grab this thing, I can left click, I can drag things around and it moves. Everything connects, but it settles down quick enough. Sometimes you get seasick by having too much motion, but this is fine.
I also like idea of having of parenthesis to add text to lines. You can see it says “Line Text” right there on the line. Let's head over to what I like. You can see right there. I've put, in parenthesis, “Line text here” so that equates to this. So pretty cool.
Frustration Points:
A few things that I think are frustration points or I think things that would frustrate me if I used this a lot.
One is that I can't edit the map. I can't sit here and double click on this. I can't edit right in the map. If I want to make a change, I have to find where I'm at in the text. Then I have to go down and hit Draw Mindmap again. There you go. You can see the changes have been made. I think it would be easier, obviously, if I could just click on the node and edit that after I've entered my information. But you have to back and re-draw it. That's a frustration point.
The second thing is that when you have your information you can download it as a PDF or an mage. I tried downloading image and it took a little while and it was tiny as well. I put in here that the image is tiny, because it seems a bit small for the size of the visual map, which means that if I'm trying to zoom in really big or use it for a presentation it may not always show without being pixelated and there's now way to change the size when you download the image, so that's a frustration point.
Overall impressions:
Overall, my impression it that it's really tough, because you can't really work with the information. That's a huge downside to me. It's handy being able to just grab something and just dump it in, like I mentioned.
I do want to say that it's an interesting tool. It's kind of fun to play around with it, and drag and drop things.
I'm not sure if I can add this to the recommended list, but it's definitely cool. I'd say head over here, put some information in, see if it works for you. If it looks interesting to you, go ahead and check it out.
Thanks for watching the video. I hope you enjoyed it. We'll talk soon!
