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

[Listera]

Parry Ruparelia:

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

Sounds like you're on PC. But for those who prefer OmniGraffle on OSX,
there's a really simple way to generate relationship graphs (like a site
map) via an ascii or an Excel file.

1.  Create an Excel doc with 4 columns and put in your relationships:

        Col1    Col2    Col3    Col4
        A   ->  B   ;
        B   ->  K   ;
        L   ->  T   ;
        K   ->  A   ;
        [...]

Letters are placeholders for your pages. "->" will create an arrow from Col1
to Col2; "--" will create a connecting line without an arrowhead, etc.

2.  Save this in ascii/plain text as "YourFileName.dot"

3.  Open it in TextEditor and wrap it like so:

digraph "g" {
        A   ->  B;
        B   ->  K;
        L   ->  T;
        K   ->  A;
}

4.  Save and open it in OmniGraffle. Voila, you now have a chart with boxes
and arrows.

5.  You can customize the look of this to the nth degree in OG.

6.  You actually don't need Excel to generate the .dot file obviously, any
text editor will do. You can generate the page relationships by hand, in
Excel or in a database, all you need to do is to is to wrap it in the end
with a header and semicolons. I generate such files totally automatically
from an app I wrote. The format is the open source graphviz, which is also
available on OS X:

<http://www.pixelglow.com/graphviz/>

----
Ziya

Heterogeneity happens.