Product Reviews

ConceptDraw Office is a suite of three related applications: ConceptDraw MindMap; ConceptDraw Project; and ConceptDraw Pro, from Ukrainian developer CS Odessa. The unifying theme for these three applications is the visual development, management and presentation of ideas. They are cross-platform Windows and Mac programs that have actually been around for a little while, but the new versions in the Office release represent a major new push.

Regular office suites let you create word processor documents, spreadsheets and presentations. ConceptDraw goes for the bigger picture, helping you come up with those big business ideas in the first place, work out how you're going to achieve them and then see it through to the end. You can use these programs individually, but there is an underlying workflow, and it starts with ConceptDraw MindMap.

Hoary old Mac uses of a certain age may remember Tony Buzan's BBC2 Use Your Head series from the mid-1970s. Buzan developed the concept of mindmaps as a way to express ideas and their inter-relationships graphically.

ConceptDraw MindMap links this with the popular business tactic of brainstorming. You can build your mindmaps in the normal way, adding topics and sub-topics to your main idea, or you can switch to a brainstorming mode where you just type them in, as they occur to you, within a set time limit.

This is done so that your creativity isn't reined in by your critical facilities. In this phase, all ideas are good. When the brainstorming phase is finished, you can organise the ideas you've come up with into a mindmap.

It's easy to link topics and sub-topics, and to add relationships between topics, and even symbols and clip art to help reinforce the mental associations. Indeed, the mindmapping tools themselves are good - or as good as they can be on a computer screen. The only problem is that it's all a bit too neat and uniform. You can change the mindmap's design theme and the properties of individual objects, but it's not the same as the hand-eye-brain synergy you get with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil in your hand.

ConceptDraw MindMap redeems itself in other ways, however. With a conventional mindmap, once it's done, you have to manually transcribe your diagram into linear text or something else you can actually develop from there on. Here, it's done for you. Your mindmap can also be viewed as an outline, a

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hierarchical list of headings and sub-headings. This will immediately feel like solid ground for Word or PowerPoint users. There's no translation or conversion process involved - it's simply a different way of looking at the same ideas structure.

There's a lot more you can do with your outlines. For a start, you can add text notes, callouts and hyperlinks. They can be used for background information, messages to yourself or your colleagues, or links to reference sources. But you can also reword your topics to read as tasks, set start dates, end dates and durations, and 'auto-numerate' them so that they appear as a hierarchical list of tasks in the outline.

This is where it gets clever, because now you're already most of the way towards a proper Pert (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) diagram, where you define an overall goal and then develop a WBS (Work Breakdown Structure). Using the appropriate checkbox symbol for your mindmap, you can click repeatedly to increase the 'progress rating' of that task.

Project management professionals want Gantt charts, not fancy diagrams, and this is where ConceptDraw pulls its next trick. There's a button on the toolbar marked Open in Project. When you press this button, your mindmap opens ConceptDraw Project (while simultaneously closing in MindMap, just to avoid any confusion). All those timed tasks that you set up in the mindmap are translated into bars on the Gantt chart and the list of tasks has the same hierarchy set up in the mindmap outline.

Very neatly, ConceptDraw Office takes your raw ideas from that first brainstorming session right through to a finished Gantt chart, with timelines, milestones, deadlines and costings. And when you need to produce a report, it's generated in ConceptDraw Pro. But this isn't all that it does, because CS Odessa puts it forward as an alternative to Microsoft's Visio on the PC, a general-purpose diagramming tool for practically any illustrative task.

If you don't produce diagrams as a rule, have been put off by the blank-page paralysis of Illustrator or the cheesy clip art in PowerPoint, or think only professional designers can produce professional-looking artwork, then ConceptDraw Pro is for you. It has an enormous library of templates for everything from website structuring to the layout of your office floorplan. Each has a tabbed library of shapes, which you can drag on to your workspace, and customise and connect as required. In ConceptDraw Pro, if you can work a mouse and you know where your keyboard is, then you're a professional designer. When you can create a decent diagram in five minutes flat, you start to realise how useful they actually are.

ConceptDraw Office isn't cheap. The $499 asking price comes out at about £252 at current exchange rates, but you are getting three very good applications, and this price represents a considerable saving on the individual prices. Besides, you can always try before you buy, with the 30-day trial download.