Thought Guide is an additional tool to help you build Discussions. You can add thoughts in the map view as described above, but the Thought Guide lets you add more detail about the links you are creating, and helps you remember other link categories to add. Making this additional effort will enrich the data on IMINDI, and make it more useful in the future. Selecting Thought Guide will open the viewscreen to an association worksheet where there are seven words across the top: All, Why, What, Who, When, Where, and How. Below this are two columns labeled From, and To. Here you can specify which thought links to another, and how it links (what kind of link it is). Choose the best "W5H" category to link your two thoughts. You can choose to link thoughts that have already been created, or add a new thought by typing it in the righthand box. Click "Save Thought" at the bottom to make the link.

Below the From and To boxes IMINDI generates a list of recent thoughts in that Discussion. Imindi will also provide terms that it found searching your Notes and resources automatically. You can click on one to put it in the box above. If you don't see a thought that you know exists, type the first few letters in the box and IMINDI will autopopulate a pulldown list for you to select from. Or click on "more" at the bottom of the list and more choices will be shown below the box.

Adding more links in the other W5H categories will flesh out a fuller definition of your central thought. The category labels will become green once you have used them at least once for each central term. Selecting the "All" tab will let you select link types from any category at the same time.