Keywords

Keywords are used to link nodes that have something in common. By clicking on the icon with the letter T in the upper toolbar, you can open the keywords view in the left margin. There, the software lists all entries, and you can create new entries or delete existing ones.

To add a keyword to a node, click on it and select the keywords you want to assign from the list by checking the boxes. The letter T now appears at top left in the corresponding node, indicating that keywords exist for this node.

Searching and Evaluating

The Edit | Search menu option lets you call the program's search function and then proceeds to search for node names, content, and keywords, among other things. The Map and List node types let you evaluate such a search.

To do so, you first create a new node of the Map or List type and keep the window open with the empty contents of this new node before running the desired search. As a result, the software provides a list of all nodes that meet the search criteria.

From this list, select all the nodes that you want to insert into the new Map or List and save them using Insert into View. In this way, the same node can appear in different views and thus in different contexts, which in turn makes it possible to highlight it from different angles.

For example, a node with a new idea can appear together with a positive evaluation in a Map with new options, but also in a Map with risks, where it is negatively evaluated. Changes you make to a node in a view always affect all other views as well.

Thinking Hats

Compendium was developed to create mind maps, but it is also suitable for the Six Thinking Hats technique (see the "Six Thinking Hats" box). As an example, create a new project, in which the focus will be on a specific question about an appropriate node. Starting from this one node, now create six new nodes, one for each thinking hat. Next, you convert each of these six nodes into a thinking hat by right-clicking on a node and selecting from the context menu Change Type To | Stencils | De Bono 6 Hats Thinking.

Thinking hats act as mind maps within a mind map (Figure 3). Double-clicking on a thinking hat node opens a new workspace in which you can develop a mind map based on the approach of the respective thinking hat.

Figure 3: In Compendium, you can combine the 6TH method with a mind map. Each of the six thinking hats has its own mind map. The number on the left side of each node indicates the number of nodes in the thinking hat's mind map.