Articles tagged with: 'freemind'

This is probably the most important section of the guide, because writing documents, spreadsheets, and occasionally presentations or databases, forms a consistent and considerable part of the working day.

The choice of office suite, and other office type applications, together with the knowledge you have in using them, is one of the most important factors dictating how much, or how little time you will spend at your computer.

The guide has taken considerable care in choosing a small set of programs which provide suitable functionality, together with a pragmatic approach to using them.

FreeMind is a simple mind mapping tool, written in Java, by Jörg Müller. Mind maps present hierarchical lists, using nodes and edges, displayed graphically. I personally find it easier to prepare a graphical project outline, rather than a formal high level project specification.

Additionally, it is easier to start building a graph, rather than preparing a text document – it can help get over the “blank page” writing block that most people suffer from occasionally, and it is easier to add, delete, or move elements around. Finally, it provides a succinct overview, which can be more easily absorbed by colleagues. FreeMind is an open source implementation, which has been well received by users and industry critics alike.

Apart from advising you on choosing from the enormous amount of software available, and showing you how to install, and uninstall the software, the guide also provides pragmatic information on using the programs.

The goal of these tutorials is to provide you with just enough knowledge to make you reasonably competent in the shortest time. They also serve as a basis to become proficient in using one or more of the programs, should you wish to invest further time on them, by offering pointers to more detailed information available on the Internet.

In this tutorial, we'll look at creating a mind map. Just to remind you, a mind map is a hierarchical set of nodes, connected together by edges (lines), which are displayed as a graphical map. The guide's choice of mind mapping software is FreeMind, an open source program, by Jörg Müller.

The following are the download links for all the software discussed in the guide. It can be used to collect all the necessary files on to your hard disk before you use the articles to install the software. It also serves as a reference to the latest versions, which may differ from the versions shown in the various guide articles, as those articles are updated somewhat less frequently.

The downloads are presented as a set of tables, one for each section of the guide. Each table gives the program name, links to the web site and where you can download the software, the current version number, which files to download, and the associated guide article.