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Organizing your Data

Organizing your Data

The Ravel wiring canvas is essentially unlimited, which means you need tools to organise and navigate it as your model grows. Ravel provides two main tools for this:

  • Bookmarks, which store a location (and a zoom scale) into a Bookmark menu; and
  • Groups, which store a set of operations to reduce clutter on the canvas.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks can be created in two ways:

  • By storing the current wiring tab view—both the xy location of the top-left point visible on your monitor, and the zoom scaling in use—via the “Bookmarks/Bookmark this position” menu; and
  • By entering a text block and clicking the checkbox to make it into a Bookmark

Figure 63 shows the latter operation. The Bookmark “GDP Calculations” is added to the Bookmarks menu, and you can navigate to that spot by clicking on its entry.

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Figure 63: Creating a bookmark from a text entry

Groups

A group is created by clicking on the wiring canvas and dragging the mouse to surround a set of widgets, then right-clicking on the greyed-out area and choosing “Group” from the context menu—see Figure 64.

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Figure 64: Creating a group

A Group can be given a name via the right-click/context menu “Edit” command when the mouse is hovering over a group.

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Figure 65: The operations shown in Figure 64 are grouped in “Calculating Change in Household Credit"

A group can be resized using the arrows on its corners. This can reduce clutter on the wiring canvas, while still providing access to the operations within the group if required.

Group Plot

By default, the group display uses a stylized circuit diagram. But you can make the group much more informative by creating a plot within the Group and using the context menu’s “Make Group Plot” to identify that as the Group[‘s plot.

Then that chart will display as the group’s icon, as shown in Figure 66.

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Figure 66: Using a plot as a Group's icon

Editing a Group, and Group Transparency

There are 2 ways to edit the contents of a group:

  • By hovering over a group and choosing “Open in Canvas” from the context menu; and
  • By zooming in on the group.

Once the Zoom is sufficient to identify the components within the Group, the group icon will become transparent, and you can edit items within the group without having to open it on the canvas.

The Browser Window

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which is accessible via the Var widget, or via the Insert menu, makes it easy to access these variables and parameters so that you can work with them to do your analysis.

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Figure 67: The Browser window

The Browser window is an “Always on Top” window that you can place anywhere on screen. When you click on an object in the Browser window, that object is attached to your cursor so that you can place it where you want it on the canvas.