Freeplane Tutorial Extensions

Tutorial 1.2.8

Tutorial

Freeplane 1.2 is under development. This tutorial gives a preview to its most important features. To view and navigate the tutorial, click on the link "Tutorial" below the image on the right. The tutorial is also available in menu Help of Freeplane 1.2, under Getting started. (Note that viewing the tutorial through the Interent the look and feel is less and some features are not available. If you use the tutorial from the Help, the look and feel is optimal, but the options are restricted to read only. Only if you load the tutorial as a .mm file in Freeplane, alle functionality is present.)

The tutorial does not give an introduction to the WHY of mind mapping. Below is a short introduction and are some didactic examples. Please contribute by giving your opinion and by providing more didactic examples. The place to contribute is the Freeplane forum [1].

Introduction

Take the Freeplane...

Freeplane is free and open source mind mapping software. It can be used for knowledge and project management, notetaking, presentations, and writing essays, books and theses. This manual will provide an introduction to the software and help you understand some of the many ways it can be used.

What is Mind Mapping

A mind map is really just a generic tree diagram to which you can add colours, icons and pictures as visual aids. It has a central topic or idea from which other topics and ideas branch out in a hierarchal fashion. This provides a remarkably easy and useful way to work with many kinds of information. Computer mind mapping, in particular, allows for easy manipulation and reorganization as well as clear presentation of information. Besides it allows integration with other tools like agegenda's to make working a pleasure.

What Freeplane is Not

Freeplane is not an all purpose visualisation or diagramming tool. There are many different ways to represent information, and many different tools are available. Freeplane is not a concept mapping, or "network mapping" tool in which any node can be placed anywhere and connected in any way. Freeplane is not a tool for drawing flowcharts. It may be contorted to do some of these things; but many free specialised tools do a better job.

What Freeplane is

Freeplane is a mind mapper; a generic tree editor, outliner and visualization tool with strong emphasis on knowledge management, presentation and manipulation. Essentially it's a knowledge/information management environment for people, not computers - that is, the aim is to make the information maximally comprehensible and manageable for the user.

Why Freeplane?

Freeplane aims for maximum ease and speed of use. Occupying the middle ground between an editor and a diagramming tool, Freeplane allows the user to add content as quickly and naturally as they would in a text editor, yet producing structured content that can be manipulated as easily as a diagram. The workflow is unimpeded by the need to think about and manually place each piece of information; the user can intuitively input content as paragraphs and headings, and easily reorganise at a later stage.

Freeplane allows for granular presentation at any level of detail, as each piece of information is a unit in a hierarchy, any level of which can be displayed or hidden with a single click. Thus Freeplane allows a synoptic overview of any project as well as the ability to focus in on the small details.

Advanced information management features such as metadata tags and filtering options allow for alternative views of a project. Strong import and export options and an open file-format means your work is never locked into the application.

Examples

Personal environment

Dashboard

Actie dashboard

When Freeplane opens it starts with a standard mind map. This map can be modelled into a dashboard with direct access to the most important information at home and on the Internet. You can do this by simply dragging hyperlinks into your map. Besides you can add notes to hyperlinks to remember their meaning. Alo you can set signals to remember when you have to give attention to this information. This makes Freeplane paricular supportive in implementing Getting Things Done. Or you can add a node with private information like keys for Internet pages and protect it with a password that only you know. To view and navigate the map, click on the link below the image. <TO DO: Translate map to English>

Work environment

SWOT analysis

SWOT analysis

Mind maps can be supportive in carrying out all kinds of analyses. In this, Freeplane suports using images and arrows with labels to display concepts, which helps to keep oversight and focus. In cases these are not enough, Freeplane supports using hidden text which the user can roll down or hover. Click on the small triangles, or hover the cursor over the images to see a descriptive text. To view and navigate the map, click on the link below the image.

School environment

Assignment & Presentation

Sjabloon spreekbeurt

Spreekbeurt

A map can be used to provide students with an assignement for a presentation, including directions, types of questions and links to litterature. The student can click the literature links to open the literature and add answers to the questions - in the map itself.
The map to the left contains a map with keywords for questions and literature links. For the advanced student these could be removed. Once the assigment is completed and the result is entered in the map, the map could be used to learn and do the presentation. The map to the right contains model answers to the questions which could be used to check the result. You could protect these answers with a password so the student can see them only after you gave him the password. To view and navigate a map, click on the link below the image. <To DO: translate the maps in English>

Animations

The following are some examples of animations. They were made in Dutch for FP 1.1.3 and need to be adapted to 1.2 and translated in English.

• Instruction for viewing mindmaps in Freeplane.
• Demonstration of Details, notes, attributes and filtering.
• Making your first map.

Links

Scripting

• Dialog in script
• Carret position