Working with graphs: yEd

If you ever worked with Visio or needed to create some graphs, you will appreciate any tool that can simplify the process and as a plus, be freeware. One of such tools that I tried is yEd graph editor. This tools was written  in Java and it is absolutely amazing. It is simple, intuitive and can do everything that Visio can and even more. Just to mention some of the things that I found very useful:

1. Creating your own shapes very easily
2. Organizing shapes and lines in different layouts (and I can tell you that it works much better than Viso and it gives amazing results)
3. Importing graphs from Excel (now this is very useful feature that gives you ability, for example, to have a list of classes in txt file, and to create Excel tables from it which you can import in yEd and entire graph with relationships that you defined will be created for you)
4. Searching nodes, links and everything else is very simple and powerful as you have many options for search (for example you want to select nodes that are only of specific color)

 

Check out link for yEd Graph Editor if you want to download this tool.