A few months back, I began a series on “financial professionals going graphical”. The goal was to focus not on presentation graphics (although that is very helpful, especially when numbers make our audience’s eyes gloss over), but on graphics as part of the planning, simulation, creative and analytical process. Over my last few entries, I’ve covered mind mapping, topic mapping, virtual worlds, and UML (unified modelling language). I will once again generalize by hitting on some alternatives to data entry in these tools.

In my introduction to this series, I mentioned that we would “discuss different ways of getting started (e.g., text, tables, outlines or templates/digital stencil, drag and drop, connections (or both)), and how to leverage information once entered.” In family vacation terms, it’s often “not about the destination, but the journey.” Many of my favorite products in these classes have failed in the marketplace because the end result can be created with the pervasive Microsoft product suite, such as Visio or PowerPoint. My issue with the Microsoft products (for which I am very thankful) is that they can duplicate the end product (the “destination”) but do not share the tools to facilitate their creation (the “journey”). In XBRL terms, we sometimes call it the “bolt on” versus “built in” story. The niche products don’t always survive or are unevenly supported or updated.

I am not a psychologist, so I can not speak to how our brains work in the creative function. But I have heard we have a dominant hemisphere (left brained: analytical; right brained: creative) and that being able to spark both sides will lead to greater achievement. (There’s also a saying that “They say the average person uses less than 10% of their brain, and social media proves it.”)

Let’s head back to flowcharts for a minute. In a typical flowcharting solution, you pick graphical objects from a series of templates and assemble them “manually” to form your flow chart. With Word, Powerpoint or Visio, you would drag flowchart shapes (e.g., process, decision, data) onto the canvas, and then join them with one of the lines/connectors. But what if you didn’t have to spend time dragging and dropping and connecting to bring together the process; what if you could just type in the processes as text, type “?” to indicate a decision or ":" to initiate a series of choices and the software nicely created the graphics for you? This was the premise of allClear flowcharting software. I say “was”, as that product is no longer available, having gone through a number of owners over the years.