[Sigia-l] Microsoft excel sitemapping tool..???

[jeff at jefflash.com]

> Does anyone know of any automated method 
> of creating a visual sitemap from a 
> Microsoft Excel file?

It is possible to do it "cleanly" with Excel+Visio, but you need to tweak
your Excel data. I ran into this problem about a year ago and found a way
around it. I started with Michael Angeles' article
-->
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/automating_diagrams_with_visio.php
which was a good start, but I needed to do more to get it to be
"desirable," and ended up tricking out my data a bit.

The short answer is that your content matrix in Excel needs to not only
display the page ID #, but also the parent page ID #, along with the page
title. So, in delimited format, something like

PageID|Parent|PageName
3.4|3.0|Books
3.4.1|3.4|Mystery Books
3.4.2|3.4|Romance Books
3.5|3.0|Movies
3.5.1|3.5|Action Movies
etc...

I wrote a formula to take the PageID and strip off the last digit and
period to automatically refer to the parent, rather than doing it by hand,
so that helped.

Then, I exported the data from Excel and imported it in Visio using the Org
Chart Wizard. It displayed beautifully, requiring only a few minor tweaks.

Hopefully this explanation made sense. Feel free to contact me off-list for
more details or examples of the spreadsheet. I actually started writing
this up for Boxes and Arrows as a followup to Michael's article, but got
busy and sidetracked halfway through. If enough people are really
interested, with a big of cajoling, I may think about finishing it up...

Jeff

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