Scapple

Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 23, 2016 at 12:56 AM

shatteredmindofbob wrote:
>The export files don’t seem to preserve any kind of
>hierarchy. I realize that may be by design but still, I’d find this a
>lot more useful if there was more I could do with the data once I’ve
>made a map, like pull it into a more traditional outliner to refine it
>further, for example.

I’ve just run into this problem as well with a larger concept map. I’ve decided to try Scapple for Windows once more, as I had difficulty extracting a usable outline from VUE, plus it kept crashing when I tried to dictate into it with Dragon, while Scapple could handle that.

Yes, it would be nice to get a hierarchy out of Scapple. It’s not entirely hopeless though, as the OPML export, while only producing a flat list in my case, managed to keep the neighouring items more or less next to each other.

So after I have imported it into Natara Bonsai, it should only take a few keystrokes to indent and move around items to reconstruct the original hierarchy, which is probably easier than the method the Scapple user manual suggests, i.e. copying and pasting each item from a PDF export.

Nonetheless, it would be nice to have a concept mapper that could export a more ordered hierarchy natively (even if it might be impossible to reconstruct all the relationships).

Does anyone know of a comparable concept mapper with an easier workflow for turning a concept map into an outline?

The other option would be to just forget about concept mappers and use a mind mapper instead. I did in fact start out the map with Freeplane, but for some reason it felt less constraining to do the brainstorming in Scapple.