Upgrading to MindManager 6

I recently completed the upgrade to MindManager Pro 6 (from 5) production version and found a few things that may be of interest. This post deals with the install and upgrading the application and map styles. I’ve been “6’ing” my existing maps to exploit some of the new features and will cover that in later posts.

Find old settings; I un-installed MindManager 5 rather than running them side by side (you can with a few restrictions) and found all my previous settings, icons and templates were left in the old MindManager 5 directory. I chose to tidy up some of my templates & content rather than transfer everything but was good the old content survives the un-install.

• I found it at: C:\Documents and Settings\[LOGON]\Local Settings\Application Data\Mindjet\MindManager\5
• For some reason the MindManager button didn’t appear on the IE tool-bar after the install;
  • I looked in the customise tool-bar dialog and found it was available to be added to displayed tool-bar buttons. Odd that this didn’t happen with the beta version
    • While looking for a solution to this I noticed the MindManager 6 Knowledge Base has methods to restore missing MindManager buttons in Office applications if something prevented the them being set-up when MindManager was installed.
    • Outlook is the worst at this thanks to it’s habit of sometimes appearing to close but not totally shutting down. Although many don’t bother I still find it’s best to reboot before installing new software to give a clean environment.
• If you have an existing Outlook Sync'ed map I found the cleanest way to update was to;
  • Sync the map so it’s current.
  • Un-install MindManager 5 and install 6.
  • Delete all the tasks in Outlook
  • Open and sync the map and choose to let MindManager recreate the deleted tasks.
• Rouge Status Icons;
  • A few tasks gained priority and completion icons that weren’t there before?
  • They cleaned up after I removed the icons in the map and did another Outlook sync.
  • Fastest was to find them with the new “Power Filter” feature.
• Task Categories become “Categories” text map makers;
  • MindManager 6 no longer links these to Outlook Task Categories
  • I have learnt to live with this but think it was a bad move, enough to get text markers a sad face on my MindManager 6 Features map.
  • I’ve kept my old categories intact in the hope that linking will return…?
• Easily set your favourite default map format!
  • Configure the map as you want it with styles, layout etc
  • Go to Format>Style>Make current map style the default and MindManager will use it for “new” maps.
• Easily update existing maps to the default style; This was heavily used in the last few days rolling our new company logo into all my old maps as I’d used the logo, very faint, as the background image. I updated my map styles/templates and the default map to the new logo. The fastest way to update maps was to use the new default style was;
  • Format>Style>Reset current map style to default. Much quicker than opening and browsing through the template/style dialog.

Disclosure: I purchased my initial MindManager 5 licence but this upgrade was provided by Mindjet