The best layout to use, and can I do it with data imported from a spreadsheet

Question

I play an online text based game on a space based theme.  You have a 20,000 sector universe and it has what are called dead ends and bubbles.  A bubble is a group of sectors that only have one entrance and then spread out from there, in tunnels leading to dead ends - kind of like the branches of a tree.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone could tell me the best way I could represent this graphically and quickly.  I have written scripts that give me all the 'tunnels' inside the bubble, and I have even saved the data in a spreadsheet, each 'tunnel' on a spreadsheet row. So, if someone could tell me how to import that spreadsheet data and make it into a graph I would really appreciate it.

Even if I couldn't do it from a data import, I can look at the spreadsheet and quickly determine the branch point sectors, so I could quickly lay out a branching tree of nodes if I knew how to do that in yEd.  Of course it would be a huge help to have yEd import the spreadsheet data and set up the branches itself, and label each node with the number that was in that cell of the spreadsheet in it's correct node.

I just downloaded this program a couple of hours ago, so I don't have the knowledge and experience with it to figure this out myself just yet.  So I would really appreciate any help an experienced user(s) could give me with setting this up.    Thanks

Answer 1

In the minimum import set-up, the spread sheet contains a row for each connection (called edge in yEd) and two columns, the first contains the id of the start node and the second contains the id of the end node. This representation is called edge list.

As far as I understand, your sheet is already in this format, so you should be able to use it with the Excel Import feature without changes. Please see the manual article and the other forum posts on Excel import for more details, and let me know if there is something unclear afterwards:

  http://yed.yworks.com/support/manual/import_excel.html

For tree-like data, the tree layout is of corse the best choice. If the option 'Allow General Graphs' is enabled, this algorithm can handle graphs there some parts are not strictly a tree as well. Circular layout may be a good choice, too.

20000 elements is a really large number for a single picture. Splitting the whole network into smaller subparts may be a good choice.