Getting started with NovaMind 5

Getting started with NovaMind 5

This video is an introduction to NovaMind 5, and shows you the basics of how to create a Mind Map using NovaMind 5 for Windows.

It shows: The overall user interface, adding topics, using the themes and color sets, Mind Map layout and moving topics around, automatic coloring and topic style options, the media library, adding adornments and images, resizing topics, and topic notes.

Further, more detailed tutorials will cover these topics in depth, but this tutorial is everything you need to get started.

A transcript of the video follows:

In this video, I’d like to help you to get started using NovaMind 5 for Windows.

When you start up NovaMind, it will look like this.

At the top, you have the ribbon bar, with tabs for the different options, a getting started panel, and until you have entered your license key, you will have the trial ribbon on the left.

Let’s start with the Getting Started panel. When you click on the Introduction video button, it will allow you to watch videos to help you understand NovaMind 5 and get started using it quickly. When you click on Welcome Mind Map, it will open a Mind Map that tells you about a lot of the features of NovaMind 5, as well as some of the important shortcut keys, so that’s definitely worth a look.

But for the moment, let’s just get started with our first Mind Map.

We make it really easy to get started, because when NovaMind starts up, your first Mind Map is already created and the title selected, so all you need to do is to start typing. Notice that even if you haven’t closed the Getting Started panel, it will be put away automatically when you start your Mind Map, but if you want to see it again at any time, you can access it through the Help menu.

When you have put in your text, just press Enter to finish editing.

To add a sub-topic, press Insert. To add a new topic as a sibling of the topic you have selected, press Enter. To add a sibling above the selected topic, press Shift+Enter.

When you add anything to a Mind Map, the colors, fonts, and styling of the object are defined by the theme you are using at the time. If you want to change the overall look of the Mind Map, you can select a different theme. If you have changed any formatting to be different to what is used in the theme, then your custom formatting will be honored when you change themes. Wherever you see an option to reset the formatting to the default, it will remove the custom setting you have applied and revert to whatever the theme defines for the selected item. If the theme doesn’t define anything specific, in many cases the option will be inherited from its parent topic.

You can change the overall coloring of the Mind Map by selecting a different color set. Any colors that are set using the themed colors will be changed to their equivalent in the new color set, ensuring that the colors still go well together and have the same relative intensity.

You can alter the layout of the Mind Map by selecting a topic that you want to lay out the children of, and choosing a layout option. Quite often you will want to use the radial layout for the first level topics and linear layout for the subtopics, but it’s up to you – the layout settings can be changed individually on any topic.

You can set the angle that the subtopics are laid out at using the angle control. If you click on one of the quadrants, it will rotate the axes to be either vertical or horizontal in that direction, but if you want it to be laid out at another angle, just drag it to be the angle you want.

In most cases, the automatic layout of the topics should be everything you require, but occasionally you may want to move a topic to a specific location. To do this, just mouse over the topic and you will see both the graft and move controls. To move the topic to another place, drag it using the move icon with the four arrows on it. To put it back into its automatically laid out position, use the Reset Location option. If you want to move all the subtopics of a topic back to their default locations, use the Arrange Sub-topics option.

You can use the Automatic Coloring to make your subtopics look good. Just select the option you want, and any subtopics that don’t have their coloring manually set will use the automatically calculated color. This allows you to make interesting looking, colorful Mind Maps with a minimum of effort.

You can style the shapes in different ways using the gallery of shape styles which are generated based on the themed colors and other style settings. This is just a convenient means of setting a number of options all at once to give an aesthetically pleasing result.

If you want to have finer grained control, you can use the settings for the fill and line. We recommend you stick with the themed colors where possible so you can change to a different color set, and it will still look good.

To make the topics look more interesting, you can either drag on images directly from the file explorer, or you can use the built in media library.

We do provide a a huge number of images for you to use from within the NovaMind media library, and we will be adding to the number of libraries available for download over time, but to get started, you should download the Initial Library. This contains over 3,000 images and is therefore quite a large file, and will probably take a few minutes to download, but once you have started the download, you can carry on your Mind Mapping, while it completes the download and installs itself in the background.

You will see that there are two categories of images there: Adornments and Images. The adornments are special images that will automatically go on the left end of the topic, and are used as a visual indicator of a particular meaning. You can have as many adornments on a topic as you like – just drag them on, and you can drag them to reorder them. To remove an adornment, just drag it off the topic.

The Images can be dragged on to the topics, and you can have up to four images on each topic. Just drag an image on and drop it in the quadrant you want it.

As you build your Mind Map, you are bound to need to graft topics from one place on the Mind Map to another. To do this, drag the topic by its graft handle. If you have multiple topics selected, they will all be grafted in the graft operation. The indicator will show you where the topics will be attached when you drop them, so you can easily see what the effect will be. If you want to create a copy of the topics, you can hold the Ctrl key down while you drag the topics. You also have cut, copy, and paste available if you prefer that method of working with your topics.

You should be aware that if you are using the radial layout, there are topics on the left and the right of the parent topic, and if you just move a topic, it will still be laid out as if it was on the side it was attached to, so if you want to swap it to the other side, you will need to graft it from one side to the other. This gives you a lot of flexibility in the way the subtopics are laid out in relation to their parents.

You can resize your topics by dragging the resize handles. Once you have resized a topic, you will see lock icons that indicate that you have locked their size and are not using the automatic sizing for the topic any more. If you want to revert to automatic sizing, click the lock icon.

Often you will need to add more information than you would have just with the keywords on the topics, and this is done using the topic notes. You enter the notes by selecting a single topic on the Map and displaying the notes sidebar panel.

With this basic information, you have everything you need to create your Mind Maps, but of course there are a lot of powerful features and options that we have not touched on in this overview. For in depth information on these topics, please see the detailed tutorial videos.