Beginner question - Excel data

[LoH]

Hello,

I am new to Visone (and networkanalysis) - I only used Palladio so far. I have four small(ish) networks from the 18th century. My main sources are letters and meeting-protocols. Quite often the actors (and their alteri) are only mentioned in those sources, and rarely are the autor/receiver. 

Now I am unsure how to code the excel-sheets, because the sheets I made for Palladio are not working. Has anyone suggestions?

I appreciate every input! 

Thank you!

[Müller Julian]

Hi Lorene,

I find your question quite vague and too broad for a substantive reply. But I will try to help from a purely technical perspective and explain how to format the Excel sheets and how to import these sheets into visone.

I suggest you create two kinds of Excel sheets, one representing the entities and one representing the links.

The entity sheet should look something like this:
ID attribute1 attribute2 ...
Entity1 value value ...
Entity2 value value ...

The link sheet should look like this:
linksource linktarget attribute1 attribute2 ...
Entity1 Entity2 value value ...
Entity3 Entity7 value value ...

These are usually called node and edge/link lists.

You should export these as CSV files from Excel. In my version of Excel, I can do this via File/Export, and clicking on "change file format/type".

Note: Depending on your language settings, Excel might export numbers using decimal commas instead of decimal points if the user's language predominantly uses decimal commas. Many tools, visone included, will not understand decimal commas. If Excel exports decimal commas, can either replace them by decimal points using the search/replace feature in a text editor, or teach Excel to export CSV files using decimal points. In my version of Excel, the setting for the decimal separator can be accessed through File/Options (or Settings) and navigating there to "Advanced".

After exporting from Excel, the resulting CSV text files will probably look something like this:
ID;attribute1;attribute2;...
Entity1;value;value;...
Entity2;value;value;...

You can then load the links and entities into visone as follows (if each entity is involved in at least one link):
Go to File/Open... and select the CSV link/edge list. Make sure the import settings are correct (particularly whether visone chose the correct link source and link target columns and that the table preview at the bottom looks right).
Afterwards, open the attribute manager (from the toolbar at the top) and navigate to "import/export" (button on the left) and "node" (button on the top). Choose the node list file under "import" and again make sure that the import settings are correct (i.e., the table preview at the bottom should look right). Please also check whether visone chose the right attributes to join the node list with the edge list; if you loaded it the way I described and created the files as in my examples above, you should select "linksource" as the network attribute (and not "id", since that is an attribute that was automatically generated by visone and thus matches no attribute in the node list).

A different approach is needed to load networks with isolated entities (i.e., entities not involved in links) from CSV files. If some isolated entities exist and you want them represented in the network, please tell me and I will explain how to load such a network correctly.

If you need further clarification on how to load a network from Excel sheets into visone, feel free to ask.

Best wishes,
Julian