Using For Currriculum Diagram

Question

I'm a complete newcomer to yEd with a very specific desire.  I'd appreciate suggestions about whether yEd is the best tool for what I want.

I'm responsible for a university curriculum in which we need to advise students about what courses they need to take, and when.  The difficult part is indicating prerequisite connections between courses.  I've created diagrams using Excel (time left->right) with courses (boxes) aligned vertically in each of our 12 terms.  I used lines between boxes to indicate prerequisites.  It works, but is somewhat difficult to maintain and only allows displaying in that view.  My users would like different display formats - especially straight list vs my diagram format.

Does anyone know of an example of addressing this issue, either with yEd or some other software.

Answer 1

Well, yEd is an editor for network-like diagrams (or more formally graphs) and what you describe is a network-like diagram, so yEd is a good choice for creating the desired diagram. However, yEd does not offer the possibilty to display your data as "straight list" as you call it. Thus you would have to maintain your spreadsheet for list views and a yEd diagram for diagram views.

That said, your requirement of displaying both a list view and a diagram view seems very specific to me - so much so that I think you will need a custom-made application for supporting both types of views in one application. If developing a custom application is an option for you, take a look at the yFiles library for handling the diagram view.