Once you become a KNIME expert you will want to completely stop using Excel. I know that sounds completely unbelievable, but it’s true!

In the meantime, you’ll want to jump back and forth between KNIME and Excel.

For most business organizations (where Market Simulation is likely to be used) Excel will be the way you collect raw data and share results with colleagues. And while KNIME offers great nodes for loading data to-and-from Excel, most of us will continue to rely heavily on the ol’ copy-and-paste method of moving data.

Unfortunately KNIME hasn’t got this completely right. It’s easy to copy your data into Excel, but what about your headings? Because KNIME treats data and data-types differently, your headings will always be left behind when you copy-and-paste. It can be incredibly annoying when you have to manually re-type all of your headings back into your Excel spreadsheet (you’ll find that the convoluted method ending in paste-special-transpose is no quicker).

This example provides a couple of simple ways to get KNIME to create an output dataset which also contains the column headings (as well as the row headings) that you want.

This KNIME Node Use Case provides an example of a useful KNIME workflow. These workflows do not depend upon Market Simulation but can supplement a Market Simulation workflow. If you have not yet installed KNIME, go to Getting Started.

The ‘Extract Column Header’ KNIME node will put the names of each of the column headings into a single-row table. These are then added to the top of the original data with the ‘Concatenate’ node. After you open the final output table, you can:

• Ctrl-A or ⌘A (Select All)
• Ctrl-C or ⌘C (Copy to Clipboard)
• Ctrl-V or ⌘V (Paste into Excel)

Header
Row

 The RowID’s are also not included in the copy-and-paste, so these too need to be added to the concatenated data.

The RowID is first converted into a column of data. This column of data then needs to be moved from the end of the table to the beginning so it matches the original KNIME table.

Row ID
Column

Workflows can be cleaned-up and simplified by pushing a lot of the unimportant detail into “Meta Nodes” (Metanodes). This workflow collapses the Copy-and-Paste logic into a reusable Metanode.

Copy & Paste
Ready