🤓 MeisterHacks: Making Presentation Notes with a Bulleted Outline

Miša Hennin

Making a mind map can help you get your thoughts in order when preparing for a presentation or speech. However, some users find it's not that easy to read from a mind map during a presentation. 

Outline mode lets you turn your visual mind map into linear form, making it ideal for presenting.

Do you already use outline mode? When do you switch to outline mode? I'd love to hear!

Joerg Koper

Hey @Miša 👋🙂

I have to admit, that I didn't work with the outline mode until today. But when I tried it out it made my workflow so much faster. This feature is a killer 😋

Some advices for all users that want to try it out too:

• When you're taking sub-notes, you can create them using the tab key
• when you're typing - or * like you normaly do in MeisterTask for bullet points, it won't work (you'll see - or * instead in your mindmap)
• you can of course use the markdown of MindMeister to format the text directly in the outline mode or when taking notes in a meeting etc.
• when you activate the outline mode for pasting your copied notes make sure, that you're not clicking into the text field (blinking cursor) or make use of the right click on your mouse (context menu to paste the copied text). That won't work.
• You can activate the outline mode and directly paste the copied notes without clicking anywhere. You'll see a wonderful structured list and can directly change the view back to MindMap View.

I give a clear recommendation for using the outline mode 😎

Best, Jörg

Olaf Roeb

If I may add,@Jörg Koper to what you so greatly described: The outline mode also offers a really great help if you copy a list of topics from external sources to be presented in mindmap nodes, especially in quickly substructuring data.

Kind of a workflow suggestion for this type of use cases:

• Copy(external list)
• -> Paste into the outline-mode MindMeister list
• edit with markdown and/or insert to define the sub-node structure as Jörg described above
• -> look-up the resulting map view and maybe switch back into outline mode to further edit or substructure by inserting with tab
• Just so you know: When you paste a list into the outline mode, for some reason in some cases MindMeister reverses the order of the pasted list. This isn't so much a problem in a mindmap as in an editing tool, but it may be with longer lists, so just don't be surprised.
• In a very short time of trial and error, I found a beautiful solution for efficiently pasting external lists into a mindmap via the outlining mode, which beautifully streamlines the mind-mapping process of existing arrays of data.

Absolutely second Jörg's recommendation, this feature of MindMeister really deserves more attention and at least some exploring.

My best in a still new year, Olaf👴

Joerg Koper

Good morning @Olaf Roeb 👋😉

and thanks for telling about your insightful experiences too. Regarding to the sometimes reversed order of pasted lists I suspect that it could be due to the formatting of the foreign program or a website. This behavior often happens in web design, while copy and pasting text that is formatted in word or similar programmes.

Best, Jörg

Emily

Wow thanks for the bump on this post, I hadn't ever really considered outline mode as a workable feature, since I didn't feel it fit with my mind mapping work with students. Had never considered the copy/paste suggestion.

Joerg Koper

Hi @Emily 👋😉

I'm sure your students will love this feature too 😎

Miša Hennin

Thanks for sharing your tips and first impressions @Jörg Koper, I'm pleased to hear you've tried it out 😀.

The final tip you shared was especially interesting to me. It could make a brilliant MeisterHack of its own, especially with @Olaf Roeb's expansion/ added detail.

Thank you both for sharing and adding value to this post. ☺️