Quickie: Convert FreeMind to MindManager

July 24th, 2009 by Scott

I’ve been playing around with MindManager lately, and have been pretty impressed (though, unfortunately, not by its price tag).

I have a few maps in FreeMind that I wanted to convert over as I continue to evaluate MindManager. I did a lot of searching the web and found some stuff on MindJet’s site about converters, but they don’t work in MindManager 8, or whatever..

Turns out the solution is really easy:

  • Open FreeMind and select the root of whatever you want to transfer.

  • Copy to clipboard.

  • Open Notepad and paste from the clipboard. You should see your tree as a tabbed hierarchy.

  • Select all and copy to clipboard.

  • Go to MindManager and paste. Easy!

    • You can’t copy direct from FreeMind because it (apparently) supports multiple clipboard formats, one of which looks like XML or HTML. Pasting into MindManager gets some crazy stuff. I didn’t notice a “Paste As…” feature like Excel etc. have so you have to go through a basic text editor. No big deal.

    This obviously won’t bring over any formatting, probably no icons, attributes, large notes, etc. But it was good enough for me.

    Posted in mindmanager, trick |

    Previous post:
    Next post:

    6 comments on this post.

    1. SachaL:

      July 30th, 2009 at 2:13 am

      I must say this is super simple. And way more easy than to migrate on a new version or using an import function.
      Thanks Scott for the useful hint – saved me a lot of time

    2. Alexey:

      October 19th, 2009 at 10:55 am

      Where is Notepad in Win XP?

    3. Scott:

      October 19th, 2009 at 10:57 am

      Is that a serious question?

    4. B:

      June 30th, 2010 at 4:40 am

      You’re a life saver, thanks for this info, I was seriously contemplating slitting my wrists coz I couldn’t import FreeMind into MM8!

    5. Sébastien D'Errico:

      July 26th, 2010 at 7:07 am

      Hello guys!

      I was able to convert all my freemind to mind manager with my iPod Touch and keeping my formated stuff: color, font, icons.

      I bought mindmanager for iPodTouch/iPhone (around 5$-10$). In this small application, there is two options: import from freemind and export to mindmanager. So I did:

      1) Import my freemind file
      2) Modify my freemind file then save (like add a “dummy node”)
      3) Export to mindmanager

      I do not know why, if I do not modify the file in step 2, mindmanager crash when I opened the exported version on my pc.

      Hope it is useful for somebody!

      Sébastien D’Errico
      sebastien@hollox.net

    6. Scott:

      July 26th, 2010 at 7:52 am

      Thanks for the tip!

    Leave a comment





    Want to paste some code into your comment? Just wrap it in [code] [/code]. Also, please note that off-topic or overly commercial comments will likely be removed at my discretion.