Copy items to a new chart

To focus on items of interest or to change the emphasis of your analysis, you can copy selected items to a new chart. To view the items from a different perspective, you can copy them to an association chart or to a timeline chart.

For example, during your analysis you might investigate activity over time, which results in a histogram with a large amount of activity in one particular time period. Selecting the period of interest in the histogram selects the relevant chart items that you can then copy to a new chart for further investigation.

The copy to new chart features are on the Analyze tab. When you copy items to a new chart, the new chart is based on the original chart that you copied the items from. Basing your new chart on the original chart avoids issues such as differing grading systems, and means that appropriate entity types, link types, palettes, and so on, are available for you to continue working.

You can copy only selected items, or include the direct links between the selected items. To include direct links, even if they are not selected, use the with Connections version of the relevant option. For example, after you select telephones on a chart, to copy the telephones and the calls between them, use Copy to New Chart with Connections.

If you select a link to copy to a new chart, the entities at each end of the link are also copied, even if they are not selected.

Note:
If hidden items are selected as part of your analysis, they are also copied to a new chart. They retain their hidden status but are revealed in gray.

Copy to New Chart

During your analysis, you might identify a set of chart items that you want to focus on specifically. For example, you might want to gather further information about particular people and add this new information to a different chart. Alternatively, you might want to concentrate your analysis on a subset of your original chart.

When you use the Copy to New Chart feature, the entity representations remain unchanged and the chart items remain in the same position relative to each other.

Tip:
If you copy items that are spread across a large chart, you might want to arrange the chart items automatically in a more convenient layout. To rearrange chart items automatically, select the Copy to New Association Chart or Copy to New Timeline Chart feature that corresponds to your chart. The chart perspective does not change, but the items are automatically rearranged on the new chart.

Copy to New Association Chart

If you have a timeline chart, you might identify a set of chart items that you want to focus on from a network perspective. You can copy the selected items to an association chart. For example, during your timeline analysis, you might identify a group of individuals and want to look at the relationships and associations between them.

When you copy items to a new association chart, on the destination chart:
  • Any entities that have a representation of theme line are changed to icons.
  • Controlling status is removed from any items that were set to be controlling. Their status is set to free.
  • Any groups around items are removed and the chart items are arranged in a layout appropriate to network analysis.
  • Display and printing of the time bar is turned off.
Note:
If you select all of the items on the new association chart and copy them to a new timeline chart, previous settings such as controlling status are not restored.

Copy to New Timeline Chart

If you are analyzing from a network perspective, you might decide that you want to look at the same set of data or a subset of that data from a timeline perspective.

This feature is useful if you are working with an association chart that contains many links between pairs of entities where each link is displayed individually - that is, with a multiple connection style. For example, there might be many transactions between two bank accounts with each transaction displayed as a separate link.

When you copy items to a new timeline chart, on the destination chart:
  • All entity representations are changed to theme lines, except for:
    • Entities with a representation of event frame
    • Labels
    • Entities that have data in their date and time properties and have a semantic type that is derived from the Event semantic type
  • The following chart items are set to controlling when they have data in their date and time properties:
    • Event frames
    • Links between theme lines
    • Entities that have a semantic type that is derived from the Event semantic type
  • Any groups are removed
  • The chart items are arranged in a layout appropriate to timeline analysis
  • Display and printing of the time bar is turned on
Note:
If none of the items that you try to copy to a new timeline chart has populated date and time properties, Analyst's Notebook displays a warning that arranging them in a timeline isn't possible. This situation commonly occurs when chart items contain i2 Analyze records, because the charting scheme must be configured to populate the item properties from date and time properties in the records.

To enable timeline analysis in these circumstances, ask your system administrator to use Schema Designer to make changes to the charting scheme on the i2 Analyze server.