Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

I would like to talk about my experience in drawing mind maps using OpenOffice.org Draw. I am happy with it because it is easy to select and change the shapes and colors. Though Draw does not have a specific function of making mind maps, Draw provides a number of choices for creating shapes and connectors. These choices are essential to constructing mind maps.

I hope that more people learn about the power of Draw in terms of drawing mind maps. Please see:
http://mindmapapp.blogspot.com/2007/12/ ... -draw.html

MMAPP

I haven't used Draw very much, but I tried to recreate your mind map diagram, and found it very easy to use. The connector lines are especially powerful. Is there a way to make the tool "sticky" so that you can draw several connector lines without reselecting the tool?

BTW if you save all your screen shots as PNG images instead of JPG, not only will they be much sharper, but they will also have a smaller filesize. The attached file was only 47 Kbytes after exporting from Draw, and has been further optimised with PNGOUT from IrfanView. There is no need to do this, unless your site uses lots of images, as it takes a while. Another benefit of PNG is that they support transparency, so they look good on different background colours and patterns.

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:The connector lines are especially powerful. Is there a way to make the tool "sticky" so that you can draw several connector lines without reselecting the tool?

Double-click the tool button when selecting it.

I agree that for contextual maps for presentations, Draw is hard to beat. The connectors lets you maintain a complex network easily, and by using line and shape styles you can easily change visual properties uniformly across your presentation, catering for different presentation media and/or audiences. Layers lets you group content that's not always pertinent, and transparency and 3D object projection can provide the little extra visual impact you need.

For hierarchical mindmapping, there's another piece of software I prefer. FreeMind is so quick to work with that it's almost like working in notepad (I use it to take notes during lectures), and with complex maps you can collapse and expand branches at any level with a keypress. There's even a crossover link option, so you're not limited to hierarchical maps, and there's a calendar functionality with alerts available per map node. And you can export your map to several formats, including OOo Writer (text outline). The formatting options is nothing near Draw, though.

Incidentally, FreeMind is a specialist Mind Map drawing tool, and it exports as a OOo outline (although it is in the old .sxw format).

A quick update on FreeMind - it will now export an outline in .odt format (0.9.0 RC6) as well as .png .jpg .svg for the graphic version of your map