The Mindjet Labs

Demonstration macro that builds a map based on a data from a Microsoft Office Excel Spreadsheet, a Map template, and map parts.

Installation:

1. Download and Unzip ExcelDemo.zip into a directory on your system.
2. Add the CreateMap.mmbas macro to one of the menus in MindManager.   I suggest using the Tools menu.  Read here on how to add a macro to MindManager.

What the Macro Does:

1. Creates a new Map based on the Building Project.mmat template.
2. Open the Excel spreadsheet (Roles.xls or Roles.xlsx) as an ADO data source.
3. For each topic with the Role text marker,  search the Excel data source for all of the rows with the role from the topic text.
4. Create process topics with the process.mmmp map part from the data in the process column.
5. Create sub-process topics with the sub-process.mmmp map part from the data in the subprocess column.
6. Create notes topics with the note.mmmp map part from the data in the notes column.

 Tinkering with this Demonstration:

• Change the map template.
• Change the map parts (process.mmmp, sub-process.mmmp, note.mmmp).
• Change the data.
• Adapt it to work with your excel data.
• Adapt it to work with another data source entirely (there are ADO providers for Access, XML, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server and other data sources).
• In the macro Transaction_Execute() subroutine, change the connection and provider to use an Excel 2007 spreadsheet.

What Macro/Object Model Techniques You Can Learn from this Demo

• How to query ADO data sources.
• How to use Document Transactions to group object model calls into a single undoable action.
• How to iterate through all of the topics in a map.
• How to query a topic for a text marker
• How to use the debugging output window to debug your macro.
• How to create documents from templates.
• How to create topics from map parts.
• How to show a message box to the user.

Note:

This demonstration was adapted from a real-world customer solution that we built in three hours working with the customer at a Mindjet Labs workshop in San Francisco.   Read here about how it was built.