MindManager 2002 is designed to help anyone who has thousands of ideas, but the ability to concentrate only on a few. Since this is almost everyone, the developer hopes that this software will have wide appeal.

It applies the methods of Tony Buzan, famous for his numerous studies of what he calls 'mind mapping'. Buzan postulated that the most successful way of managing the human brain's many thoughts is to focus on and write down key words, rather than complete transcripts.

MindManager 2002 is designed to automate the process. Beginning with a core idea in the centre, you create main topics branching off leading to sub topics and so on. The premise is that you add ideas as they occur to you and as one thought inspires another.

Text can be attached to ideas and displayed in a separate window, symbols are available to act as visual cues, and colours can be changed to catch the eye. Furthermore, you can attach links to separate documents and web pages.

Since a free viewer is available from the developer's website, MindManager files can be emailed and inspected by anyone. Alternatively, the data can be exported and converted to text files or web pages, with the map in the middle and the branches displayed as a hierarchical menu on the left.

The program borrows from Office XP to build a pleasant-looking application with task panes, substantial tutorials and help from audio/visual examples.

It does the job well enough but suffers from an inescapable problem: all this mind-mapping could be done perfectly well with pen and paper for much less than £60.

SPECIFICATIONS:

• Attach Word documents
• Create hyperlinked pages
• Task panes
• Text window
• 21-day free trial

Price: £59.99 (inc VAT)

Minimum requirements: Pentium 133MHz PC; Windows 95; 48Mb Ram; 30Mb free disk space.

Contact: Murge 01202 258825
www.murge.com