How can I get my imported data to show mutual edges when necessary?

Question

Hi,

I am having difficulty getting the right graph from my imported excel spreadsheet data. The table I am importing is very simple.

A	B	C
B	A	C
C	A	B

The first column consists of my nodes' IDs. The next two columns consists of "choices of partners" the given nodes make. So, A picked B and C, B picked A and C, and so on.

My problem is the following: when I import datas similar to these, the graph I get is wrong. My edges don't connect the 2 right nodes. I found that they never create a "mutual" connection. So if node A picked node B, and node B picked node A in return, my graph is not going to show this mutual relation between them. Instead, it shows B looping around and connecting back to itself.  How can I fix this issue in order to have correcponding graphs that shows "mutual" connection between two nodes when necessary.

Thank you.

Answer 1

The format in which your graph is represented in the Excel file is called 'adjacency list' in graph theory, and, currently, it is not supported by yEd. For yEd, the data must be either in adjacency matrix or edge list representation. In general, edge list is preferable since it is more space efficient, flexible and it allows importing additional data values for the connections.

In an edge list, each row corresponds to exactly one connection and contains at least two cells with the ID of the source and target node, respectively. Beyond that, your spreadsheet may contain an arbitrary number of additional columns with data like label text, line color, etc.

Please have a look at the manual page on Excel import for more details, and the related posts in this forum with at least one vote:

• http://yed.yworks.com/support/manual/import_excel.html
• http://yed.yworks.com/support/qa/search?q=excel