YWorks yEd Graph Editor overview. YWorks yEd Graph Editor is a Productivity program. You can open it on Windows, Mac, and Linux. YWorks yEd Graph Editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux can be found on official stores. YWorks yEd Graph Editor supported file formats include.GML and other formats of similar type. The yEd Graph Editor, more commonly referred to as simply yEd, is another really powerful software for graphing, mind mapping, swim lane diagrams, flow charts, family trees and lots more. The software packs a neater interface than the very close competitor Dia, but doesn’t offer as many features as the former.

Here I’m going to make some notes about using yED graph editor for Theory of Change diagrams. I’ll add to it as I find out more.

YEd Graph Editor creates diagrams with drag and drop and offers a variety of shapes. Users can make any custom type of charts from simple to advanced ones. It offers different shape nodes, edge types, group nodes, images with people and can customize each element on the workspace: background, borders, colors, font, size, rotation angle and more. YEd is a general-purpose diagramming program with a multi-document interface. It is a cross-platform application written in Java that runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and other platforms that support the Java Virtual Machine. It is released under a proprietary software license, that allows using a.

TL;DR: Seems like a very useful tool for Theories of Change.

Online version

There’s an online version. It has plenty of functionality but you don’t seem to be able to save to a public address, so that you could for example share a link to a diagram with someone else. So the main advantage is just that you don’t have to bother to install anything, rather than that you could work or share collaboratively. (I might be wrong on this.)

Yed Graph Editor Zip Download

Offline version

I installed the offline version for Windows. (Looks like it’s available for Mac and Linux too.) I had to install as administrator because otherwise the installation routine said I didn’t have the correct rights.

Important for Theories of Change:

Various automatic layouts, e.g. hierarchical

It allows you to put nodes inside groups, and these can be nested, and also opened & closed - good for complicated diagrams.

Supports plenty of unicode symbols and emojis (I haven’t found any which aren’t supported.)

You can import node and edge lists from xls and from“trivial graph format”. That’s pretty important when you’ve got a lot of text. Looking at the diagrams which people make at theorymaker.info, lots of text is a pretty common problem - though I’m not a fan of it myself.

Powerful

It’s pretty powerful.

Yed Graph Editor Portable

Some features:

There is a Properties panel which allows you to change the properties of a multiple selection of nodes.

Cut, copy and paste.

Multiple undo.

Yed Graph Editor For Mac Windows 10

You can easily create non-standard edges.

Not implemented or I’ve not worked out how to do it:

I’ve not worked out how to make nodes auto-fit to the width of the text - you have to do this manually with tools/fit node to label

I’d like to be able to inter-operate with R. yED can write graphml and the R package igraph should be able to import it, but the import fails with warnings. Found the same complaint on StackOverflow but no solution.

Disadvantages

It’s a bit clunky to add a lot of material initially. There is very limited support for keyboard shortcuts, basically you can press Ctrl+W to add a child node or Ctrl+D to duplicate one.

In my opinion it is really important to maximise use of space, i.e. text needs to be as big as possible without too much white space, so you can actually read the diagram e.g. when pasted into a document. yED is not so good on this.

Comparison

I did try Lucidchart, which is free for small diagrams with up to 60 entities - but it doesn’t have groups and doesn’t seem to re-route connectors.

Comparison with my own Theorymaker apps:

For me, it’s really important to be able to put nodes inside groups, and that these can be nested. (Actually I don’t nest groups very often at all, but as Theorymaker, my“Logic of Theories of Change” ;-(), allows for it, I need a graphing app which can do this too.) I couldn’t find any suitable graphing app which could do this easily, which is one reason why I started creating my drag-and-drop app at i.theorymaker.info. Perhaps I was wasting my time, as yED can do it, at least it can, now in 2018 ;-(

The comparison with my text-based app is more interesting. One thing yED can do is easily draw arrows to and from groups, which theorymaker.info can’t do without a hack.

(to be continued)