EasyMapper/Productivity

EasyMapper's facilities for mapping text documents

Flows to create mind maps of text documents – including automatically!

More manual flows

In the most laborious version of making a mind map, you read a title, type your text as a subtopic in the mind map, and repeat this for the entire structure.

Although it takes longer, this version is not all bad; typing the text is a way of studying, it helps to know and fix the content to some extent.

A faster flow than simple typing is by using the clipboard: you go to the source, copy the text, go to the app, select the target topic and paste, and repeat that for the entire structure.

In this flow you place the windows of the document app and the mind map app side by side, selected text and drag and drop it into the mind map.

This possibility depends on whether your mind mapping app has the ability to receive the dragged topics. This is the case with EasyMapper. But you have the option to copy and paste as well.

Using the Table of Contents

The summary of the document can speed up the elaboration of the mind map, with some circumstances. In the following examples I will use the document from which the Start section of the EasyMapper website is generated.

Below you see the summary of the document (reduced to 2 levels).

The table of contents shows the structure, but when you copy it to the clipboard and paste it as text, it looks like this:

In other words, the structure was lost. Also, it has the page numbers. If you paste this text into EasyMapper as new mind map, it looks like below.

That is, we would have to recompose the structure, edit the root to insert a title and edit each topic to remove the page numbers.

We can change the table of contents of the document to not display page numbers, and the copied text would look like below. We are free from numbering only.

We can recompose the structure in the mind map, but one option I find generally faster is to do it in a text editor (I like NotePad++), inserting tabs as appropriate. The table below shows the result.

Now, pasting this text as a new mind map into EasyMapper produces the following result:

Automating!

From version 2, EasyMapper automates all this work with a few additions. For this, there are two requirements.

The document to be mapped must be of type .docx or compatible, such as .odt.

The document should also be structured in headings; in MS-Word it is the paragraphs with styles Heading 1, Heading 2, through 9. Mapping documents without an explicit structure is another type of activity quite different, the mindmapping of texts. At the end of this section we present an option to facilitate this.

Mapping the structure

Click the button in the top toolbar and select From document. The dialog below appears.

In the Extraction area, select the file to map. Leave Extract text unchecked. Click Update; the structure will be extracted and shown in the right panel.

In the Generation area, select New Mind Map. Click Generate and all of the above work is done automatically.

If the document has more levels than you want to extract, before generating the mind map you can limit them in the Maximum Level field.

Below is the extracted mind map with maximum level set to 3., with edition of the root only to reduce its width. Note that its content is identical to the above, the one where we manually assembled the structure, except that the root text used the file name and hyperlink in the root to the source file.

Mapping a discursive part

The Generate panel of the dialog above has the Extract Text option. When checked, the text within each heading is also extracted and included as a note from the topic corresponding to the headline. The same mind map above would look like below with the extracted text.

Ballon icons indicate that topics have notes. The figure below shows that the Collaboration Productivity topic is selected, and the note window shows the note for that topic.

One limitation here is that the text is extracted without the formatting.

If you want to continue the mapping by including the discursive part, EasyMapper also makes this task easier by allowing you to extract subtopics from the text of the note. To do this:

• Edit the note
• Select text
• Right-click and select Create a subtopic.

If more than one row is selected, you also have the option to extract a subtopic for each row.

Note that this feature of extracting topics from a note applies well to the mindmapping of texts, avoiding a lot of arm movement! By the way, this feature is also available when editing the text of a topic, for one subtopic at a time.

Consolidating Document Multiples

If your content is distributed across more than one document, you can consolidate the extraction into a single mind map. To do this, simply use the Current mind map option (figure) in the generation dialog. Repeat this for each document.

The extracted topics will be inserted into the selected topic or, if none, as a main topic.

Special case: PDF files

EasyMapper does not generate mind maps from PDF files directly. If your content is in this format, you have the option to convert the document to Word on the I love PDF website.

The PDF format internally has no structure to the text, only pages and characters, and this site does a really admirable job of being able to recognize titles and tables.

When automatic doesn't suffice

Texts may have a structure that is not very suitable for a mind map, and automatic generation may not meet the needs, at least not sufficiently. In particular, a mind map may require more concise texts, and the original texts need to be adjusted.

One option I have is to go through the text by setting up a scheme. For example, an earlier version of this article focused on automatic generation of mind maps and started like this:

I started making a mind map with the same title as the article, and the topics for this section looked like this:

Automatic generation of mind maps from text documents

Requirements

DOCX file or compatible

Doc with heading paragraphs

I repeated this and completed the scheme, eventually moving the scheme closer to the section being mapped.

By the way, note that I ignored the last sentence; mind maps of articles have the primary purpose of facilitating the use of the content, and I evaluated that it did not have relevant information for this purpose.

When the outline of an article has a first version ready, I select its text and paste it as a new mind map in EasyMapper. "First version", yes, because, like the writing of a text, the elaboration of a mind map is iterative, that is, we make several revisions and versions until we reach the desired level of quality.

An intermediate step in this flow stems from the fact that it happens that some tabs I type in Word don't appear in the copied text and the structure isn't perfect. What I do is, before I take it to EasyMapper, paste it first into a simple text editor and check the advances.

Something curious happened in this episode: creating the mind map for the article revealed opportunities for improvement, and I ended up changing the article's scope from automatic generation to the current one, making mind maps of text documents. And then the text's structure became much more similar to that of the mind map! Occupational hazards...

Summary

Below is a summary of the content of this article in a mind map, containing what we consider relevant for you to apply the content.

Click here to download this mind map in PDF (159 kB).

Click here to download the original mind map (.easyx, 3 kB).