Tutorial 4 - Arranging and coloring your Mind Map

In this tutorial, you will rearrange the branches to be in the order you want, and make sure the branches are colors that appeal to you, and are easy to read.

In the previous tutorial, the branches were added in the order we actually want them to be read, but because we were using assisted layout, they were added in the next available space where there was the most room. We now want to move them into the order we want them read.

Traditionally in Mind Mapping, the branches are read from 12 o'clock clockwise, so for the moment, we will assume this is the way we want them organized.

2.	Hold down the Shift key while clicking on the other three top level branches to select them too. You should now have all four top level branches selected.

3.	Now you could change the branch shapes using the Main Menu, or hotkeys, but for the purposes of this tutorial, we'll use the branch palette.

5.	Now it is sometimes nice to have rounded ends on the rectangles. Use the corner palette, and change to rounded corners and slide the slider all the way to the right.

1.	We look at the Mind Map and think the colors are all a bit intense. Click on the background (or canvas) to deselect the branches and show the map palettes.

2.	Switch to Specified colors and see what happens, then switch back to Rainbow colors. Try turning the Angle around and seeing what happens to your colors, but for the purposes of this tutorial, return to the starting position with the thumb at the top of the wheel. Turn the saturation down a bit.

3.	Now we notice that the yellow branch is a bit too faded out, so we will change it to be a more suitable color. Click on the "Get the Facts" branch to select it.

4.	In the Line palette, uncheck the Inherit checkbox. This means that we are no longer using the automatic coloring, and will be able to set the color manually.

5.	Click the Color colorwell, and the color picker panel will be shown. Choose a different, brighter color - maybe a bit darker and more orange so that it shows up better.

7.	We notice that the blue branch is rather dark and makes it difficult to read the text, so we think we will not fill the top level branches with color.

1.	Click on the map background to deselect the branches, and show the map palettes

3.	This style will change your map background. Map styles can be set up to change just about all of the map settings, but this one only changes the background image.

4.	Now select one of the top level branches - say "Get the Facts".

5.	Control+Click (or right click) the branch to show the context menu, and choose the option "Select Siblings" to select all the other top level branches.

7.	This shows you the settings that can be changed using styles - now for interest, select each of the top level branches in turn and apply a different one of the pastel styles to it.

We have been using palettes for various things, so it's worth mentioning some of the things you can do with palettes:

1.	If you are not going to be using the options on a palette for a while, you can click the "-" icon on the palette toolbar, and hide the palette's contents

2.	You can drag the palettes into a different order so that the ones you use most are at the top, or at least are grouped together

3.	Some palettes have a little icon on the top right corner which allows you to flip the palette over to see advanced editing options - more on these later in the tutorials

4.	You can hide the palette dock as mentioned in tutorial 1

5.	You can drag palettes off to be separate windows, when they are dragged off, click on the "x" close button to close the window and return the palette to the palette dock

6.	You can stack the dragged off palettes together, and reorder them relative to each other. For instance, I often like to keep my Map Style and Graphic Style palettes handy like this: