New menu items have been added to NodeXL in the v.85 release made available today!

These “Visual Properties” features are part of a larger set of work items intended to make it easier to manipulate and decorate a network graph in Excel.

NodeXL recently crossed 8,000 downloads! Thanks to everyone for the interest and support for the project!

NodeXL Version 1.0.1.85 (2009/5/21) – New update to Visual Properties menu controls for controlling the display attributes of network graph visualizations.

• The Visual Properties group in the Node XL Ribbon tab has been expanded. New buttons let you easily set a visual property, such as edge width or vertex color, and have the graph automatically refreshed. If you have a large graph and automatically refreshing it takes a long time, you can turn off the automatic refreshes.
• Turning off automatic refreshes also affects the Schemes and Autofill Columns features.
• The Edit Selected Vertex Attributes feature (available when right-clicking a vertex in the graph pane) is now called Edit Selected Vertex Properties.
• The Import Open Edge Workbook dialog box (NodeXL, Data, Import, From Open Edge Workbook) now automatically selects the first two columns in the selected workbook.
• Workbook columns formatted as Text, such as the vertex names, now include a comment in the column header explaining that the format must be changed to General if you want to use Excel formulas in the column. Why are some columns formatted as Text? To avoid unwanted automatic conversions performed by Excel on General cells. Enter “1-1” in a General cell, for example, and it will turn into something like “Jan 1.”
• Bug fix: The Autofill Columns feature wouldn’t autofill the vertex Radius column in old workbooks. (“Radius” was changed to “Size” in version 1.0.1.81.) Now, an old Radius column is changed to Size when the workbook is opened.
• New source code release.
• New release of prebuilt class libraries.