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This section of the toolbar contains tools that allow you to import or export data from UNA network objects to .csv or .tsv files to or use in other software, such Excel, ArcGIS, Python etc.
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Import Points tool can be used to import Origin or Destination point data with attributes from Excel, other text or table files or GIS shapefiles into Rhino. The tables you import should include X, Y and optionally Z coordinates, which will be used to draw the points in Rhino. Other attribute columns from the original table are also brought along as points attributes in Rhino.
Import points tool
Note that there are some restrictions as to how your table columns can be named so that Rhino can recognize them as attribute names. Spaces in column names are automatically ignored (e.g. “My Name” is converted to “MyName”). Underscores “_” that form the first character in a column name are automatically removed. Column names can contain numbers but the entire name may not be a number. A few of names are reserved for internal UNA processes— for instance, “none” and “count” may not be used as column names.
The command line prompts for several options. The Format=tsv option indicates that the imported file must be in .tsv (tab separated value) format. The most common way to save tables with point coordinates in tsv format is to first use Excel to save a table as a “Text (tab delimited) *.txt” extension. Then close the file in Excel, navigate to the saved location and rename the file extension manually from “.txt” to “.tsv”. Ignore the Windows warning.
For some windows users, common file extensions, such as “.txt” are hidden by default. To rename the extension, you first need to turn the extensions on, so they are visible. On Windows Explorer, go to View tab and check the box next to “file extensions”.
Click the View tab in File Explorer and then click the Options button (or click the drop down menu and click Change folder and search options).
Click the Options button in the View tab
Click the View tab at the top of Folder Options to see file extensions, uncheck Hide extensions for known file types. Click OK.
Change viewing settings in Folder Options
This .tsv saving procedure is best done in the Windows version of Excel. The Mac version of Excel can produce a different encoding for “Text (tab delimited) *.txt” files, depending on the version of Excel used. This can result in “Text (tab delimited) *.txt” files saved on Mac not being able to be read by Rhino, even after changing the file extension to “.tsv”.
If this problem occurs, then one work around to still properly convert Mac Excel tables to “Text (tab delimited) *.txt” and subsequently to “.tsv” files, is to use a free text editor, such as Notepad++ to change the Mac encoding to Windows encoding. Download and install Notepad++ and open the “Text (tab delimited) *.txt” file that you saved from Mac Excel. Go to Edit > EOL Conversion > and set the option to “Windows (CR LF)”. Close the file in Notepad++ and rename its extension from “.txt” to “.tsv”. Notepad++ also allows you to save the file directly with a “.tsv” extension if you overwrite it in the “Save As” dialog box.
The Import Points tool offers several options on the command line:
File option enables you to navigate to the “.tsv” file you want to import.
Attributes=On option prompts the UNA toolbox to either import points with or without tags. If used as Attributes=Off, then points can be generated in Rhino without any tags included from the text file.
Weight=... ****option indicates whether or not numeric attributes are included or not in the import.
Text=... option indicates whether or not text attributes are included or not in the import.