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MindManager User Community Support ForumTopicQuestionMindManager General
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Category MindManager General
Version (if applicable) 21.0.261

Export of slides to PowerPoint is not an option. Why?

Henry B. shared this question 3 years ago
Answered

There is no "Export to PowerPoint"-Button in "Ansicht-->Folien" (View-->Slides)

Files: MindManagerLize... HelpText_Mindma...

Replies (8)

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Jan H.
Power User
● 3 years ago

Hi Henry, with MindManager 21 we made a lot of changes in slides, e.g. a new file type ".mdeck" or supporting flowcharts in slides. Therefore the old PowerPoint Export does not work anymore. With MindManager 21 Service Pack 1 you will have the possibilty to export slides as images which can be used in PowerPoint.

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Lyn C.
New User
● 3 years ago

Reading the thread, I think there may be some misunderstanding as to how many people (certainly me) used the export to ppt feature. Frankly, exporting as an image is not hugely helpful. Firstly, I have found that it can take a large map section and export it, but it will not size it appropriately and it spills over the ppt and so is not useful. At any point if you want to export the map image, you can do a simple screen shot and drop it in a ppt. I have been doing that for years.

What I personally found most useful about the ppt export was two things:

(1) It made sharing easier: I often work on a team with people who need updates on my progress, many of whom don't have mindmap or experience using it. The quickest way to share my work in progress was an export to a ppt as text.

(2) Creating the final material: more importantly, the end result (in my case anyway) will always be a ppt. So being able to organize my thoughts and then export them to a ppt for final formatting saved me hours.

Frankly, after being away from mindmap for a couple of years, this feature was the main reason I asked my current employer to buy me a mindmap license. IMO this feature is a huge loss.

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Stavros C.
New User
● 3 years ago

I understand that the changes under the hood have facilitated further enhancements, but as a potential user, I would say that this is actually a regression. I would use the trial version from time to time to help brainstorm and transfer that content into powerpoint with actual sections and headers.


I regard Mindmanager as the cream of the crop when it comes to mindmapping because of this and would justify the premium price tag - but based on these developments I would actually redact my recommendation to the business to look into purchasing this. I hope the other features that were introduced are significant enough to justify the loss of this crucial capability.

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Alex G.
MindManager Expert
● 3 years ago

I agree with you both about the importance of this feature and the need to reinstate it as a priority. It is great that MindManager are seeking to develop the program's own slide show capability, but for the majority of people PowerPoint is the only way to go, especially in team environments for the reason that Lyn outlines.

PP is also a known quantity when giving presentations in unfamiliar conference settings - yes, these days it is possible to bring your own equipment with MM installed, or run a MM slide show remotely, but none of these options have the predictability and reliability of emailing a PP presentation to the organisers beforehand, or just turning up with it on a stick.

I also often use (or used to use) MM for the initial creation of a presentation, but then export it as an outline to PP for final development and editing. As I indicated previously, I also like to integrate other material into the presentation, vary fonts and layouts, and add graphics in a way that's simply not possible with MM slides. This is why since this feature was removed I have spent so much time trying to develop workarounds to export MM slides as outlines to PP - these seem to work but are fiddly and unnecessarily time-consuming.

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Søren H.
New User
● 3 years ago

Great comment

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Alex G.
MindManager Expert
● 3 years ago

While the facility to export slides and slide decks as images and to publish slide decks in the MM21.1 service pack is welcome, I hope that the ability to export outlines to PowerPoint is reintroduced at some stage. Over the last few versions of MindManager the Excel and Word file import and export features have been retained but completely redesigned to remove any requirements to have MS Office installed; while I'm not happy with some aspects of their implementation these features work well.

I hope the same approach is being considered for the export of outlines to PowerPoint. Obviously the slides feature in MindManager is being developed into a capable presentation tool in its own right, which is fine, but a lot of people will still need to use PowerPoint. For example, they may use MM to develop the basic structure of a presentation but then use PowerPoint to add images, videos, and other material.

On the practical side, if you do want to export slides as images to PowerPoint, the best approach is to save the images to a specific folder then in PowerPoint go to Images on the Insert tab and select Photo Album. Click on File/Disk when the dialogue box opens, then select the folder containing the images exported from MM and select the images you want. You may find that the default album background is black, but you can easily change this.

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Blair Y.
MindManager Expert
● 3 years ago

Hi Henry.

The technology that we used to facilitate this capability has been retired so we had no option but to remove that capability from the offer. Right now, the export to image is your best way forward.

Cheers... Blair

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Alex G.
MindManager Expert
● 3 years ago

Hi Blair,

Since Stavros has revived this thread, I thought I’d ask about something that’s been bugging me. MindManager was able to retain the Word export facility but redesign it to remove any requirement to have the Word application installed. This new approach mostly works well and you can even export using a Word template if the program is installed.

Why wasn’t the same approach adopted with PowerPoint? MindManager has gone to a lot of trouble to maintain and enhance its facilities to turn out Word and Excel files and the program can also still talk to Outlook. Why out of all the Microsoft products is PowerPoint the odd one out?

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Alex G.
MindManager Expert
● 3 years ago

It would be great if it were possible to include slide decks as text using the new Word export facility - at this stage this option is greyed out.

At the moment if like me you want to export outlines as text to PowerPoint, there is a slightly circuitous workaround via Word:

  1. Select the topics you wish to use. making sure you have selected all subtopics you want to appear as well as the parent topics. You can filter for these, or simply use right click/Ctrl to select the topics manually. If you use a filter, check that the Hide Non-Matching Topics option is selected.
  2. If you have selected topics manually, click on Filter, Show under View on the ribbon. Check that the Hide Non-Matching Topics option is selected, then click on Selected Topics. All topics apart from those selected and their parents should no longer be visible.
  3. Start the Word export process. Select Custom export, and then Filtered topics. Select the other options you wish, but at the end of the process choose a Word .docx template (avoid .dotm templates because sometimes in my experience the export will fail).
  4. When the export process is complete you should have a Word document with the topics and subtopics shown as headings and sub-headings based on the Word template heading style defaults. Review this document to edit out any unwanted parent headings, then save and close it and open PowerPoint.
  5. In PowerPoint, start a new presentation then click on the drop down menu under New Slide. Click on Slides from Outline then select the Word document you exported from MindManager. You will probably have to do some editing on the resulting slides, though PowerPoint does a reasonable job if the original map structure wasn't too complex (a tip - try to avoid exporting topic notes when using this method, especially long ones).

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Stavros C.
New User
● 3 years ago

I have left a recommendation to our IT to take a look at Mind Manager as an alternative to Miro with the view that generating slides with MM was a huge value add. I see that this is not the case.


Is this functionality coming back?

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Blair Y.
MindManager Expert
● 3 years ago

Hello Everyone

We are looking at the possibility of this but do not generally comment on upcoming features.

The PowerPoint export needed to be retired as it was based on a deprecated technology stack.

Any future capability will need to work with the entire MindManager portfolio, not just a portion.

Cheers... Blair

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Alex G.
MindManager Expert
● 3 years ago

If it can be done that would be great Blair. As an interim measure (and useful in its own right) would it be possible to allow slide decks to be exportable to Word?

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Blair Y.
MindManager Expert
● 3 years ago

Hey Alex

Unfortunately nothing comes for free and it takes time and quite a bit of effort to get something like this done. It is not something we can just turn on.

You can export the slides to images and import them, but it will not create a bullet list.

Cheers... Blair

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Alex G.
MindManager Expert
● 3 years ago

I have discovered a simpler if still somewhat clunky workaround for this:

  1. Create a MindManager slide deck from your map.
  2. Create a new PowerPoint file, with the same number of slides as in the slide deck.
  3. Switch back to the slide deck and go to the first slide. Right click and copy the parent topic within the slide.
  4. Go to the first slide in the PowerPoint file, and paste. The topics and sub-topics of the copied MM slide should appear in the PP file default text.
  5. The parent topic isn't recognised as a title in the PowerPoint slide, though if you are using bullet points it will be less indented. You will have to cut and paste it in the title (assuming you want a title).
  6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 for each file in the MM slide deck.

Unfortunately this has to be done a slide-by-slide basis, and only the topic text is copied, ie, no links or other material, but it does work.

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Alex G.
MindManager Expert
● 3 years ago

As an update to this approach, in step 4 you actually have four options when pasting the contents of the MM slide in PP:

  1. Use Destination Theme
  2. Keep Source Formatting
  3. Picture
  4. Keep Text Only

This is quite useful as it allows you to mix the use of MM slide content as text outline and slide images in the same presentation in PowerPoint.

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Søren H.
New User
● 3 years ago

It's an absolute no go for us to purchase the programme for the whole company if there's not a integration directly with powerpoint, we have very strong PPT users that naturally also would be strong Mind Map user, it comes as a absolutte surprise to me bearing in mind how amazing the integration was before, so we will keep looking for the tool that will suit our needs on a corporate level, while im still testing the mind map for me as a single user

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