Building Maps from Excel Data

Yesterday morning, we had a Mindjet Labs workshop with some people from one of our customers, a Fortune-500 company who had the challenge of soliciting feedback about organizational changes from people in the field and to have them submit their suggestions back to headquarters in maps.  They had the org charts in MindManager and a table of roles and resposibilites in Excel and wanted to combine the two so that the people in the field will get maps with both the org chart and the roles and responsibilities for each of those roles.  They wanted a hybrid map merging the two sets of data: the org chart and the spreadsheet.  The customer came to us with the spreadsheet and the maps and were eager to learn how to automate the process using MindManager macros.

After three hours, we came up with a solution that would do the job with a MindManager Macro.  I have adapted that solution to make a demo that you could try (names were changed to protect the innocent).  Besides the existing linker from Excel to MindManager that is in the product already, when connecting to Excel data, there are three ways to generate maps from Excel:

1. Automate Excel using the Excel object model.  The problem with this is that it ties the code to the Excel object model and if the solution changes from being a desktop solution to an enterprise one, Excel probably isn't going to be the data source.
2. With Microsoft Office Excel 2007, with the Open XML File Format, the file is actually zipped XML (just like MindManager) so you could unzip the data, extract the XML and transform it to the MindManager XML using XSLT.  This solution is also tightly bound to SpreadsheetML Open XML format.
3. Using ADO, you can treat Excel data just like a standard data source.  This means that 99% of the code is data-source agnostic and doesn't depend on it being in Excel.  This counteracts the problems with scalability of data that we see in the first two options:  With the demonstration that you can download and try out, you can configure it to use either an Excel 97-2003 .xls file or an Excel 2007 .xlsx file just by changing two lines of code.  Because using ADO, you could connect it to almost any data source from Access, to SQL Server to MySQL, it is a very scalable toolkit and it's part of Windows. For these reasons, we chose this option.

Once we were able to access the data, we wrote the code to build out the map based on the client's rules and here is what we came up with:

Give the demo a try, tinker with it, and tell us what you think.  Then make the time to come to a Mindjet Labs Workshop and create something amazing with MindManager!