MindJet Diary: Dymamic Display of Data from Excel
Idea Map, Mind Map, Visualization Tagged Idea Mapping, Mind Mapping No Comments »We’ve been using MindManager to create weekly and monthly reports (status update and accomplishments maps), which we find to be a better format than PPP and Excel dashboards. The Excel Range function that we recently discovered is extremely helpful. It allows us to display selected data from a parent spreadsheet residing in SharePoint on the map by creating a dynamic display. This eliminates duplicate data entry – once a parent spreadsheet is updated, data in the spreadsheet within the map is updated automatically and there is no need to update data in the map manually. This saves us a lot of time and helps in prevening errors that come from double entry. We’ve been very excited about this function.
There was a problem though – a person who doesn’t have access to a parent spreadsheet will not be able to see data on the map. I called MindJet CS and was delighted to find out that you can actually break a link to a parent spreadsheet, which in turn will convert the datasheet on the map to a static form. It is very easy – just right click on an Excel icon shown on a map’s spreadsheet and select Disconnect from Microsoft Excel. Problem solved!