Put Down The Power Point

from San Francisco Chronicle: MindManager, a program for organizing and presenting ideas offers an alternative to Microsoft’s ubiquitous PowerPoint. MindManager is based on the theories of mind mapping, a graphics-heavy philosophy of organizing and presenting ideas using circles and lines. The technique was developed by author Tony Buzan in the late 1960s.

With MindManager, a user can present ideas on a computer the way one lays out ideas on a whiteboard using diagrams and words.
Users create circles or boxes, type ideas in them and link them with lines and arrows. Users can include Web site links and other files like videos, photos, a Microsoft Word or Excel document, or a database.
Executives and analysts who have tried it say MindManager offers a more dynamic way to make presentations than PowerPoint, in which a user lays out ideas in a series of slides.
“You see PowerPoint presentations that go on and on,” said Claire Schooley, a senior industry analyst with Forrester Research. “It’s very linear. … With MindManager, you can go in many directions.”
Stephen Wehrenberg, director of Future Force, a Coast Guard program for improving the agency, has used MindManager for years and says the visual approach is more conducive to discussing plans and projects.
“You can see more complexity,” he said. “It’s more conducive to telling a story with its complexities and feedbacks and delays and so on than a linear method of transmitting information.”