NovaMind News

In this video, you will discover new ways to make your message heard loud and clear. It will show you how to stay on topic and never get lost in your notes. You will be able to fully get to grips with the techniques for building and holding rapport with your audience and keeping them focused on the presentation, in a way that they will understand and remember.

In the last talk on presentation preparation, we talked about the presentation templates built in to NovaMind and also the 4-Mat system of presenting information in the order: Why, What, How, and What If.

We were talking about the overall structure of the presentation, and didn’t get into the fine details of delivery and wording, but along with the personality types that are being spoken to with the 4-mat system, there are four basic learning styles, and when you use the actual words that these people understand and resonate with, they will be able to see what you are getting at.

Those main learning styles are: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, and Auditory digital.

For the visual people, you should use words like: appear, clear, crystal, envision, focus, hazy, imagine, look, picture, reveal, see, show, view, and watch.

For the auditory people, you should use words like: all ears, harmonize, hear, heard, listen, question, resonate, rings a bell, silence, sounds, tune in/out.

For the kinesthetic people, you should use words like: catch on, feel, grasp, get a handle on, hard, harsh, sense, sensitive, solid, tap into, throw out, touch, turn around.

For the auditory digital people, you should use words like: change, chart progress, conceive, consider, criteria, decide, experience, know, learn, makes sense, motivate, perceive, plan, process, think, understand.

Using Mind Maps for your presentations makes your life really easy as a presenter, because your entire presentation is right there in front of you the whole time in a very compact form. You always have the topic at the center of the mind map, and the main points as the first level branches, so you never get lost, and always stay on topic.

It makes it easy to establish stronger eye contact and rapport with your audience because you don’t have to remember where you are up to on a huge page of written notes or shuffle your way through cue cards. Instead you have a diagram that resonates with your visual-spacial memory, so you can immediately see on the Mind Map where you are up to, and how that relates to what you have just said and what you are going to cover in the rest of your presentation.

The keywords on the branches keep you on topic without tying you to a particular way of expressing it, so you can open up and use your natural language instead of sounding as if you have read it out, as you would if you had read from traditional notes.

Because you can see at a glance how much information there is left to cover in the presentation, you can pace yourself and always finish on time without rushing, even if you do allow audience participation during the presentation.

From the audience’s point of view, they get a clearly structured presentation where they can see how it all fits together. The presentation is logical and flows so they can understand it and fit it in with their existing knowledge. They feel that you are talking directly to them because you are triggering their interest through the 4-mat structure and the learning style keywords.

Best of all, you can also print the mind map out without text on the branches and hand these maps out to your audience. They can fill in the text on the mind map during your presentation as you reveal it to them. This has a multitude of advantages for their attention and absorption of the information because they see it (great for the visual people), they hear it (auditory), they get to write it down (kinesthetic), they get to think about it and put it into their own words and extend the ideas (auditory digital). So all the learning styles are fully catered for in one place.

This is a very powerful presentation system.

So how exactly do you give a presentation from a Mind Map?

Start by stating the topic – the mind map’s title. Then go around to the innermost branches to give an introduction and tell people what to expect from the presentation.

Next, for each of the innermost branches, go through all its sub-branches to give the details for that topic.

Finally to wrap up your presentation, go around the innermost branches again and let that be your summary.

Normally you would give the presentation using the NovaMind presenter so that you can project it onto a screen and progressively reveal the branches, showing the first level branches for your introduction first, then go through the rest of your presentation delving into the detail as you go.

But if you don’t have those facilities available, you can:
* Export to PowerPoint or Keynote using the built-in mind map export tools,
* Print out the mind map to use as your notes,
* Set up the mind map on your laptop for you to see,
* Print your mind map out as a poster

The video covers these points in a bit more detail, as well as providing a number of tips which will really help you get the best result from your presentation, so watch the video now to get the full information.

 

 Flash Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

PowerPoint Export

NovaMind for Mac received a significant update today with the ability to export Mind Maps directly from NovaMind to PowerPoint.

This capability opens up new sharing opportunities where there is a need to brainstorm ideas using Mind Mapping techniques, and yet to share the information using more “traditional” presentation software.

Although NovaMind for Mac used to have similar functionality, it did not work with the latest version of PowerPoint, and so we took the opportunity to completely rewrite the PowerPoint export in such a way that it no longer requires PowerPoint to be installed on your computer for the export to work.

The files produced are the new PPTX files used by PowerPoint 2007 for Windows and PowerPoint 2008 for Mac.

Here is a video of the export procedure and results:

Standard text styles are used wherever possible to make sure that when you apply a theme to your presentation in PowerPoint, the styles are applied consistently throughout the presentation.

Images on the branches are transferred to the presentation, and the branch notes become speaker notes.

This makes the transition from your NovaMind Mind Map to your PowerPoint presentation almost instantaneous.

PowerPoint export is available immediately as a free update to NovaMind 4 Platinum and NovaMind 4 Pro, and requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to function.

MS Project Export and Import

For some time, the Mac edition of NovaMind Platinum has had the ability to add project related information like start and finish dates, percentage complete, priorities, and assign resources to the branches on the Mind Maps, and then import the project information into Merlin project manager for Mac.

While this is a really good solution, we realize that many of you are using other project management software. The Microsoft Project file format has become the de facto standard for project management applications, so no matter which project management software you use, it is almost certain that you will be able to use the MS Project format.

This means that you can carry out the project inception phases in NovaMind, brainstorming your ideas and working out the project’s scope and objectives, then export into Microsoft Project format for detailed project management.

During the project, if you need to bring someone new on to the project or brainstorm solutions to particular problems in the project, you can either import the whole project file into NovaMind, or export a portion of the project plan from your project management package and open it in NovaMind, and work with it in NovaMind. Using the Mind Map format makes it easy to see the interrelationships between objectives and requirements and tasks within the scope of the project, which makes it a powerful tool for both understanding where all the different pieces of the project fit together, and also for designing solutions to project related issues.

The Microsoft Project import and export functionality is available immediately as a free update for NovaMind 4 Platinum for Mac users, and requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to function.

NovaMind for Windows received a significant update today with the ability to export Mind Maps directly from NovaMind to PowerPoint.

This capability opens up new sharing opportunities where there is a need to brainstorm ideas using Mind Mapping techniques, and yet to share the information using more “traditional” presentation software.

The files produced are the new PPTX files used by PowerPoint 2007 for Windows and PowerPoint 2008 for Mac.

Here is a video of the export procedure and results:

Standard text styles are used wherever possible to make sure that when you apply a theme to your presentation in PowerPoint, the styles are applied consistently throughout the presentation.

Images on the branches are transferred to the presentation, and the branch notes become speaker notes.

This makes the transition from your NovaMind Mind Map to your PowerPoint presentation almost instantaneous.