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NovaMind 5 has sophisticated outline numbering capabilities, unmatched in any other Mind Mapping product, which allow you to number topics in a variety of different ways.

To access the outline numbering settings, use the Children Outline Numbering inspector in the Data inspector group.

If you are using NovaMind Express, the outline numbering inspector will look like this:

Outline Numbering in NovaMind 5 Express

And if you are using NovaMind Pro or Platinum, the inspector will look like this:

Outline Numbering in NovaMind 5 Pro and Platinum

The difference is because there are more advanced outline numbering options available in the Pro and Platinum editions, which allow you different formatting options for the numbering, like using letters and Roman numerals, different separators between the numbers at different levels, and prefixes and suffixes, which can be set individually at each level.

Outline numbering is applicable for the children of the selected topic or topics, and setting the outline numbering on a parent topic can affect the sub-topics to multiple levels, and can be overridden at any level below, to give unparalleled power and flexibility in the outline numbering system.

There are two parts to the outline numbering settings – the first is where you want the outline numbering shown, and the second is the formatting of the outline numbers that are shown.

Basic Settings

• Default: this uses the default outline numbering, which may be on or off at any particular level, based on the theme, and your settings on parent topics. In most situations, the only time you would change the setting away from being the default would be if you want to explicitly turn on or off the children numbering.
• All Sub-Topics: this turns on numbering for all levels below the selected topic. Please be aware that this option can result in very long and unwieldy outline numbers like 1.5.12.6.8.23 if you have a deep hierarchy and don’t use the Restart Numbering option at all.
• Numbering Off: this will force there to be no outline numbering on the children of the topic. This option is particularly useful if you have a deep hierarchy of outline numbers and for a specific topic, you don’t want the children to have outline numbers, but for most of the topics you do want them.
• X Levels: this turns numbering on for the specified number of levels from the selected topic. Note that the hierarchy is extended by this setting, so if you want the numbering to restart instead, you would have to also turn on the Restart Numbering option.

Let’s first take a simple example of where you want to set the outline numbering to go down to two levels from the Mind Map title. You would select the title, and select for numbering to go down to two levels.

Simple Outline Numbering to 2 Levels

Now if you decided that you wanted to have these outline numbers on all but the subtopics of topic 2, then you could leave the first setting as is, select topic 2 and turn numbering off for that topic like this:

Excluding a Topic from Numbering

By contrast, if you wanted to have outline numbers on the first level only, except that on subtopic 2, you wanted an additional level, you would select the Mind Map title and set the outline numbering to  1 level, and then select subtopic 2 and set the outline numbering to 1 level:

Selectively Extending the Numbering Depth

Restart Numbering

Normally the outline numbering builds up at each level – 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 etc., but sometimes you want to just start the children numbering for a particular topic back to just a single number, and that’s where the Restart Numbering option comes in.

In our example, let’s set the outline numbering to all levels from the title. Then on topic 2, we’ll turn on the Restart Numbering option like this:

Restarting Outline Numbering

Custom Formatting

The table at the bottom is for adding custom formatting to as many levels as you need. The first row sets the formatting for the first level, and the second row for the second level of subtopics etc.

So for instance if we wanted to change the formatting to be lower case letters for the first level and Roman numerals for the second level, we would add two rows on the same topic where we set the outline numbering (in our example, the Mind Map title).

To add a row, click the “+” button at the top right of the table, and the second column is where you set the numbering format. To delete rows from the formatting table, select the row and press the Delete key.

Custom Outline Number Formatting

Advanced Formatting Example

The formatting options for the advanced outline numbering are more powerful than those of any other Mind Mapping software, and give you massive flexibility.

For ordinary formatting, you would not use a prefix or suffix, but would just be changing the number format and possibly separator, depending on your needs, but let’s do some “Extreme Number Formatting“!

Let’s say we wanted to have the outline numbers formatted so they said something like

“Section 2, part 3 (iv) e.6?

(where 2, 3, iv, e, and 6 are the numbers at different levels). You would do this by setting the numbering up as follows:

Advanced Outline Number Formatting

Let’s just break this down. Each format has four components:

1. Prefix: This text comes before your outline number at that level. Note that there is no space between the prefix and the number, so you will need to add a space after it. In our case, we did want a space, so we added the word “Section ” (with a space after it) for the first row.
2. Number Format: This gives you options for the type of number – numbers, upper or lower case letters or Roman numerals.
3. Suffix: what you want to come after the number – again, if you want spaces before or after the suffix, you will need to type them.
4. Separator: this is the punctuation you want between this number and the next level down, and it is only shown if there is a next level below that topic.

Just a couple of notes about the formatting above: on the second and third level, we didn’t want to have a separator, so we chose the (no separator) option from the menu. On the third level, we wanted to have a space between the previous numbering and our open parenthesis, so we typed ” (“. The fourth level required a space before the letter, so we just typed a space in the prefix, and the last formatting level is just standard formatting with no prefix or suffix.

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Along with the release of the Media Browser, NovaMind also introduced a media library manager. The purpose of the media library manager is to allow the installation and maintenance of multiple media libraries within NovaMind. When you initially access the media browser, there are no media libraries installed, and the media browser appears like this:

Media Library before loading any library packages

Clicking on the Library Manager button allows you to see the available media libraries like this:

Initial display of Media Library Manager

In this screen shot, there is just one library installed, but in time, more libraries will be added. You can click on the Install button to download and install the new library, and the media browser will automatically be updated.

When updates to existing libraries are released, you will be automatically notified the next time you start NovaMind with a message like this:

Library Update Available

And you can update your installation direct from the media manager.

When new libraries become available, you will be notified about them automatically like this:

New Media Library Available

…and again, the new library can be installed using the Media Library Manager.

The media library manager makes it easy to see what you have installed, when new or updated libraries are available, and automates the whole process of installing the new media libraries.