Formatting a relationship marker

- The topics and subtopics that you add to your maps in MindManager 2016 will often be related. You can add a relationship marker to indicate the type of relationship that exists between your ideas. You can also format those relationship markers to help just rephrase from you can also. You can also format those relationship markers to help distinguish them from the other objects in your map. In this movie, I will show you how to format a relationship marker. My sample file is the relationship map which you can find in the chapter four folder of your exercise files collection.

This map contains a series of topics dealing with a room redesign and at the bottom you can see that there is a relationship between the sitting area and a project to add fiber optic cable to each room and I have created a relationship marker indicating that this element deals with business travelers and their needs. The relationship line has the standard formatting. I haven't changed anything. So you can see that there is a dark orange dotted line and the shape with the text in the middle has this formatting here.

If I want to change the formatting of this relationship marker I can click it to select it and then you can see that I have a number of controls. I can if I want, drag to change the endpoints on the shapes. I can also change the curvature of the line so for example by dragging one of these two yellow diamonds and you can tell your mouse is in position when the cursor changes to a plus sign and if I click here and drag down you see that you can change the shape of the line.

Dragging to the side changes the curvature and the position of the start point. And of course pressing Control Z undoes whatever your last change was. With the line selected you can also reformat the line. To do that, on the home tab of the ribbon, click the relationship button's down arrow and then click format relationship. That displays the format relationship dialog box and you can change pretty much every aspect of the line. So let's say that I'll change the color from this burnt sienna to a light blue and I'll change the pattern from dots to alternating dots and dashes and I'll make the waves a bit higher.

I'll go from one and a half points to two and a quarter points and click okay. Also notice that when I change the line color the outline of the shape's text also changed to the blue that I selected. In most cases the formatting of the relationship marker that MindManager uses when you create it will be fine. However if you want to call attention to it then changing the line's formatting is a great way to go.