First steps with Gridworks (1)

I am having the chance of testing the alpha of Freebase Gridworks and given my appreciation for the work of David Huynh and Stefano Mazzocchi I am really excited about it. As these days I am working on a little software for visualizing gene networks and I need to perform a few simple steps for cleaning the data I decided to go Gridworks (video1 and video2). Gridworks is easy to install and once I run it, Gridworks opens a page in my browser.

I am then going to load a matrix in csv format simply filling in the data file location and a project name. Creating the project I get back the view of the matrix:


I now need to clean the first column that contains names such as:
Affymetrix:CompositeSequence:Rat230_2:1389668_at

and change them into something like: Rat230_2:1389668But first I want to visualize a larger number of rows (from 20 to 50) to make sure that the pattern is always the same. I select page size: 50 and this time the operation takes a few seconds to complete.
Now I want to find the best way to modify the first column and I start exploring the contextual menu:

Several quick options are available: transform to uppercase, lowercase, title case, collapse white spaces and so on. I also see a split multi-valued cells and this gets my attention. I select it, I specify as separator the semicolumn ':' and I get back:

This is not exactly what I wanted as I was expecting to get multiple columns out of the first one instead of getting multiple rows. Well, no problem the undo feature is one click away. You can either click on the top of the screen for the last command undo or you can browse the command history on the right of the screen and go back the desire amount of steps.


And I can go back to the original state.