Laptop power issues only affecting MindMaanger performance

Hey Marian

Thanks for responding. I do seem to have a talent for generating issues that technical support 'hasn't come across before' with many of the software: programs I've used over the years. :-(

So I've been on rather a 'deep dive' creating maps and seeing how far I can take the different ways of adding additional contextual knowledge to branches through embedding / attaching for the last few years and just 'coming up for air' now (see https://scotlandthemap.info/ - interrupted by Covid, just catching up now). The 'schtick' is using MindManager to knowledge map the 'building blocks' of the 'real, geographic world' (in this case my home country of Scotland) using all the USPs in the tool box in a single map - big maps, multiple hyperlinks, embedded spreadsheets/charts, topic shapes, topic properties, tags, smart rules. So once I decide to include a particular bit of real world knowledge in the map, the actual map content is determined by it not me. For example many of the tag groups are different geographies (administrative, electoral, historic etc.) so the number of tags in each group depends on the number of separate geographic areas in each one (which can be several hundred).

I note your suggestions on working with the index marker pane and would readily concur that adding tags is a lot quicker when it's not the visiable, active pane. However though it is noticably quicker to add tags via the top menu or right click menu options, the problem I have is that many of the geographic tag groups are very large so it can take almost as long to manually scroll through them to find the individual tag to add as it does to do it via the index pane and just wait for it to catch up. Also it still can crash the map doing it this way, to which frequent saving is the only answer (I'm writing this response in between waiting for MindManager to re-boot after adding half a dozen more tags at a time before it crashes).

Because of the nature of my maps I'm not interested in ever viewing them in individual tag view, however it is only laterly that I have come to appreciate how the functionality to be able to do that is 'baked in' for any map whether you're going to use it or not. And indeed that the index pane does have to visually re-render itself everytime you add a tag to a topic if it is open (and that it it re-renders itself every time it is opened). Obviously not noticable in normal use, but very noticable at the stage my map is at :-(.

Anyways it's been challenging and fun to figure out how to encode the different pieces of real world knowledge within a single map, however I suspect I have now reached the limits and need to catch up with the publishing side of things and explore the options available in later MindManager versions.

That said though the limits are a lot. The frustrating thing to me is s that, once the tags are added, they don't slow down the basic viewing and user interactions with the map that much (it's even less of an issue in the exported HTML map), it's just the process of adding them that's the problem. To which end, I'll leave you with another question....

Question: I note that the Excel Mapper function allows you to specify that data columns can be added to the map that is created as index marker tags. Is there any way you know of to 'bulk add' existing markers to topics in an existing map? Even if there isn't currently, is it the sort of thing that could be done via a macro / add-in, or at the code level, to get round the current problems?

Best regards

Angus

PS - For reference I've attached the map I'm curently working on (still a work in progress). The large file size is mostly embedded imagery....

Oh just one more thing (as Colombo would say). On the issue of names for individual index markers and their groups. Creating them in MindManager 20 (I assume it hasn't changed since?) has a 40 character maximum limit for the text string. However using the 'Sub-Topics to Markers' tool contained theMap addin from Olympic allows for a much higher limit. You will notice from the map I attached that many of the markers have names that are much longer than 40 characters, and using this tool is how this was achieved (again these real world features are called what they are called, so I don't have control over that).

However.... clever as I thought I was at first in using the Map tool to get my 'real world' names in to markers, it soon unravelled when I tried to subsequently edit the marker or group name in any way as MindManager simply wouldn't accept the edits. Indeed if you were deleting some characters to then add new ones (eg. the unique identifying codes had changed), you couldn't add the new characters and you couldn't get back to where yoo were before you started the edit, so you were totally screwed :-(

Likewise you will notice that many of the group names are time stamped with the year in brackets. This is because there are periodic updates to various geographies (especially electoral ones) so it soon became apparent that I would need to incorporate a time stamp as part of the group name, further restricting the characters available for the actual name part.

The latest compromise naming system I have settled on is to restrict the tag group names to the standard 40 characters, but generate the longer tag names using the Sub-Topics to Markers tool. Any subsequent edits I deal with on a tag by tag basis, regenerating new ones using the tool and manually adding them to the existing group as required.

Anyway thought I'd just draw your attention to this discrepancy in case you weren't aware of it. Again for me the frustrating thing is the system can obviously technically cope with longer names, it just won't allow you to do it (and treads all over the ones you have managed to get past it!).

Sorry to 'double Colombo' you, but I've just remembered the other major tag issue I have encountered building these maps so I might as well get it off my chest here. This is about working with duplicated marker groups that have the same individual tags within them (but obviously different group names)...

Whilst it is true that they work fine in an individual map (again you will see examples on the Local Council map I've attached), they fall down when you copy and paste content to another map. Even if you have carefull set up new empty marker groups that exactly mirror the source map in the target map, when you paste the content only one duplicated group of markers is correctly assigned. The other ones are just dumped in the General Tags group. You then have to manually re-assign them to the group they should be in by dragging and dropping, before then manuualy having to re-tag them to the individual topics.

Alternatively you just start from scratch again :-(

If this is no longer an issue in the latest version then fantastic. If not then I guess I'm raising it as one now....

Again it gets back to my question above about creating a new map from scratch versus updating an existing one. There comes a point at which you've invested too much in creating and updating a map that you don't want to start from scratch again. Also you are often using the map as the primary place to record / encode knowledge working with all the MindManager uinqiue tools I mentioned above. Thus even if you wanted to build some sort of relational database that you could somehow use as the single primary knowledge source that you could then automatically 'spin off' an updated map from, I don't believe it could include all the knowledge that you can visually encode in a MindManager map.

Right that really is everything for now. Thanks again for taking the time to respond.