Flow Chart Maker

Flow Chart Maker is a simple R script that builds interactive flow charts using the VisNetwork package. It takes as input an Excel file with at least three columns: id, from, and name. Users can add as many extra columns as they wish, and the information in these columns will be displayed as a popup when hovering over a node in the flow chart. The script will output an interactive flow chart in html format which can be opened and explored in any standard web browser.

Features

• Generates interactive flow charts from Excel files.
• Hovering the mouse over each node will reveal the additional information (one line per column in the excel file).
• Users can select specific nodes and visualize their ancestors/offspring.

Installation

To use the Flow Chart Maker script, you need to have R and RStudio installed on your system.

Install R

1. Go to the CRAN R Project website.
2. Download the appropriate version of R for your operating system.
3. Follow the installation instructions provided on the website.

Install RStudio

1. Go to the RStudio website.
2. Download the free version of RStudio for your operating system.
3. Install RStudio by following the provided instructions.

Install Required R Packages

The script automatically checks for the necessary packages and installs them if they are not already installed. If you get the following warning:

Warning in install.packages: unable to access index for repository
http://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib: cannot open URL

You might be behind a firewall that is preventing RStudio to access the CRAN repositories. As a workaround, you can change secure connection settings. Go to Tools -> Global Options -> Packages-> Management Tab-> Uncheck "Use secure download method for HTTP" However, if you prefer to mantain using HTTPS for downloading (recommended), please refer to this link.

Usage

1. Download the repository:

   • Go to the GitHub repository page:
   • Click on the green "Code" button.
   • Select "Download ZIP".
   • Extract the downloaded ZIP file to a directory on your computer.

2. Open the script in RStudio:

   • Open RStudio.
   • Go to File -> Open File... and navigate to the directory where you extracted the ZIP file.
   • Select the Flow Chart Maker.R script and open it.

3. Run the script:

   • Click on the scrip and press CTRL+A (CMD+A on MAC) to select the whole scritp.

   • Click on the "Run" button in RStudio to execute the script.

   • When you run the script, it will prompt you to select an Excel file. Ensure your Excel file has at least the following three columns:

     • id: Unique identifier for each node. Can be numeric or a string. IDs must be unique for each row.
     • from: Identifier of the node from which the current node originates. Must match an ID present in the id columns.
     • name: Name or label of the node.

   • The HTML file containing the flow chart will be generated in the same directory as the input file.

   • OBS: In principle the script can be ran from the R GUI, without needing RStudio. However, currently it will not work if ran from terminal, as it requires a GUI environment.

Example

Here is an example of how your input Excel file might look:

id	from	name	info
1		Start	Starting node
2	1	Step 1	First step
3	2	Step 2	Second step
4	2	Step 3	Third step

The flow chart then should look like this:

You can add as many columns as you wish, as long as id, from, and name are present.

Author

Gabriel H. Negreira

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the developers of the tidyverse, stringr, readr, visNetwork, and readxl packages for providing the tools necessary for this script.