About NodeXL

NodeXL is a novel tool for visualization of networks. There are numerous tools for this-and-that available and coming on to, but the picture of HCI semi-god Ben Shneiderman in the contributors enlistment along with several “better schools” of the planet (i.e. Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge) woke my interest: There must be something in this!

Because of Moneysoft NodeXL works as an Excel plugin. This can be forgiven, because alongside with the vast arsenal of ready-made computing spells this selection offers familiar and somewhat intuitive user interface for, well, everybody. It does not take too long to figure out the main idea, but I would strongly suggest familiarizing yourself with the (slightly outdated) tutorial and example data sets. While NodeXL might be relatively easy to get up & running, creating visualizations like those presented in the flickr.com gallery will require deep understanding about the functions as well as some skills in visualization and computing.

The beauty of computing lies in handling big data. When your network has hundreds or thousands of nodes, it is likely that you find it fairly difficult to figure out even the most obvious patterns. This is where NodeXL really shines: Even though polishing the views might take time and effort, finding out the key metrics and arranging the set according to them with a selection of pre-defined models is very easy –and fast. For example, from the graph metrix tell you instantly the number of vertices and edges, and calculated values of graph density, maximum and average geosidic distance and vertex betweenness centrality.

To what NodeXL can be used for? Well, in case you have access to data, possibilities are various. For example, from the company mailing data you could figure out who are the central persons, and who do not interact. From your supply chain phone data you could see what are the bottle-necks in the information flow. From your Facebook friend network analysis you could figure out to whom to gossip in order to spread the message efficiently. And so on.