MeisterTip #1 – Adding Links

25Nov

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Welcome fellow MindMeisters (and non-meisters)! This is our inaugural post in a coming series of tips and tricks that highlight some of the ‘little known’ functions you can do with MindMeister. We’ll start with something simple, stay tuned for future MeisterTips.

Whether you’re conducting a SWOT analysis of your competition and want to link out to their website, a student or professor using internal links to further explain a topic, or an individual user using links to point viewers to additional mind maps you may have created; using links is a great way to enrich your dataset. There are two unique ways to add links to your mind map: either manually, or using our WunderLink feature to seek out the most relevant topic link.

Manually entering links

The option to add links can be found under the Extras panel in the sidebar. The default linking option is set to URL. You can either manually type the web address into this field or paste the address from a separate browser window. Clicking anywhere else on your mind map will associate this link to your node. Chances are, you’ve already found the best link possible for your idea, but why not let the power of the Internet double check for you? By clicking on Advanced, you’ll be presented with a dialogue box that will automatically search for the most relevant links to your topic. If you find a link that better suits your topic, simply click on it, and then OK. This will then automatically insert the link to your selected node.

Internal linking

Similar to adding URL links, you can also link to topics within your current mind map, or any other of your MindMeister mind maps. From the links dropdown list, select ‘Topic’. Clicking in the text input area will then launch a dialogue box. By default, you’re presented with the option to link to different ideas within your mind map. This can be particularly beneficial in a mind map with a wide variety of nodes.

If you’d like to link to a completely different map altogether, you can select it from the dropdown menu at the top of this dialogue box. Selecting a new map will also give you the option to link to specific nodes (even sub nodes) within this new map, or the root node itself.

Email Links

Last but not least, you can also add email links to any selected node. Again, from the dropdown list, select Email. In the text input field, enter the email address you’d like to associate with this link. As with URLs, clicking anywhere else within your mind map will insert this link. You can even add multiple email addresses by separating them with commas.

Advanced Linking Options

Using WunderLink

The second method of adding links to your nodes is by letting the power of the Internet do the heavy lifting for you. Our WunderLink feature can be accessed by clicking on the gear logo located directly below the link dropdown menu. Technically speaking, WunderLink uses an API from Yahoo! to present you with the top search results based on your node text. 99.44 percent of the time, the link that WunderNote suggests will be the most relevant to your topic. If it’s not, or you do not want to use the link WunderLink has suggested, there are two options to change it.

The first method involves clicking the gear logo again. WunderLink will then insert the second search result from Yahoo! Clicking again will give you the third result, and so on.

The second method involves manually selecting the link(s) suggested by Yahoo! If you’d rather select the result yourself from Yahoo!’s results, you can access this via the ‘Advanced’ panel. Below ‘Show most popular results for ‘x’’ you can select any one of these search results to be used as your link.

By adding links to your mind map nodes you can exponentially add value and content, and thereby comprehension to your end user or collaborative team. Whether you choose to enter them manually, or by using our WunderLink feature, adding links can breathe new levels of understanding and interactivity into your mind map.