Microreact
  • Introduction
  • Introductory Videos
  • About Microreact
    • Privacy and Terms Of Service
    • Open source software used by Microreact
    • Change Log
  • Instructions
    • Navigating the site
      • Managing Projects
    • Navigating within a project
      • History sidebar
      • Selection sidebar
      • Views Sidebar
    • Creating a Project
      • Supported File Formats
      • Metadata Data
      • Tree Data
      • Map Data
      • Timeline Data
      • Network Data
      • Matrix Data
    • Adding and Editing Panels
      • Data Table
      • Map
      • Timeline
      • Tree
      • Network
      • Data-slicer
      • Chart overview
        • Area Chart
        • Line Chart
        • Bar Chart
        • Circle, Tick, Point Charts
        • Custom charts
        • Pie Chart
        • Multi-variable Chart
        • Heatmap
      • Note Panel
      • Matrix
    • Selecting and Filtering Data
    • Labels, Colours, and Shapes
    • Saving and version control
    • Access Control and Project Sharing
      • Download Project Files
      • URL control options
    • Tips & FAQ
      • How to Link Microreact projects to Google Sheets
  • API
    • API Access Tokens
    • Creating Projects via API
    • Updating Projects via API
    • Deleting Projects via API
    • Sharing Projects via API
    • Migrating to the new API
  • Feedback
    • Contact the Microreact team
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On this page
  • Required columns
  • Optional columns
  • Formats
  • Defining colour
  • Defining shape
  • Renaming columns

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  1. Instructions
  2. Creating a Project

Metadata Data

This is the only file required for a Microreact project.

PreviousSupported File FormatsNextTree Data

Last updated 6 months ago

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Required columns

Only an identifier for your data rows is required. The ID column must be unique (i.e. each row has a unique ID value). Note that the column does not need to be named "ID" as a header, although it can be as such.

Proper visualisation in Microreact requires a single ID column that uniquely identifies each row of data in each of the related files.

  • if your data uses a combination of two or more columns to uniquely identify each row, then you will need to concatenate those columns into a single-column ID before importing the data. TIP: Use Data-flo's adaptor before importing the data to Microreact.

  • the ID values should be shared across files. IDs are the linking values that allow panels to interact with one another.

  • if a user changes the ID column name while updating the metadata table in Microreact, they will receive a warning message prompting them to select the correct ID column. This is necessary for the Microreact visualizations to function properly

Optional columns

column name (default)
other panels
column contents

latitude

longitude

date

year

Parsed as number (i.e., 2016 and 16 are not the same year).

month

Parsed as number (i.e, 03 and 3 are both parsed as March).

day

Parsed as number.

ColumnName__colour

Assign a specific colour to a data attribute.

ColumnName__shape

Assign a specific shape to a data attribute.

Formats

Defining colour

Microreact can colour by any column, and when that column is selected for colouring, colours from the selected palette will be automatically (randomly) assigned to column values. Sometimes, however, you may want to predefine which colours are used for which values.

When specific colours are desired, you can use a separate column to define the colours and set specific colours for specific values.

Defining shape

You may want to change the shapes on your Microreact panels, e.g. making the leaf nodes on a tree more meaningful via specific shapes. To predefine the shapes for a column named Country you would add a new column called Country__shape containing shape values.

Shapes are defined using the following values:

  • circle

  • diamond

  • dot

  • heptagon

  • heptagon-inverted

  • heptagram

  • heptagram-inverted

  • hexagon

  • hexagram

  • octagon

  • octagram

  • pentagon

  • pentagon-inverted

  • pentagram

  • pentagram-inverted

  • plus

  • cross

  • square

  • star

  • tetragram

  • triangle

  • triangle-inverted

  • triangle-right

  • triangle-left

  • chevron

  • double-chevron

  • chevron-inverted

  • double-chevron-inverted

  • chevron-right

  • double-chevron-right

  • chevron-left

  • double-chevron-left

  • wye

  • wye-inverted

Renaming columns

Column names can be changed in the Data even after being imported to Microreact. Note, however, that these changes may not persist if the data are refreshed and updated via API.

In addition, your can contain the following columns:

Decimal latitude ().

Decimal longitude ().

Parsed as date (ensure that is not getting misinterpreted if using a program like Excel)

If you want to colour by a column named Country you would add a new column called Country__colour (or Country__color) containing colour values. Colours are defined using standard HEX codes or valid HTML5 colour names. A colour wheel allowing you to pick colours can be found here: .

TIP: Use Data-flo to create the new column and set its values using the adaptor.

TIP: Use Data-flo to create the new column and set its values using the adaptor.

See for shape examples.

latitude/longitude
dates & date parts
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=color+picker
https://www.phylocanvas.gl/docs/constants.html#shapes
map data
WGS84
map data
WGS84
timeline data
timeline data
timeline data
timeline data
formatting
renamed
Changing the name of a column after importing to Microreact
columns-concatenation
extend-datatable
extend-datatable
data file