Introduction

Time is a very valuable thing for individual and organization, and nowadays we need to do our job in a very efficient manner weather due to the criticality of the task our to the time constraint. In this short article I’ll try to reproduce a single HTA table into many different kinds of outputs, and by doing that I’m trying to achieve two things:

R language

R is a statistcal programming language.
You can visit this site to learn how to install it - R installtion.

Create the data

We’ll simply create the HTA once in spread sheet. Please note that the data should be in table format as below.

level1 Level2
1.Fill Kettle 1.1.Take to tap
1.Fill Kettle 1.2.Turn on water
1.Fill Kettle 1.3.Check level
1.Fill Kettle 1.4.Turn off water
1.Fill Kettle 1.5.Take to socket
2.Switch Kettle on 2.1 Plug into socket
2.Switch Kettle on 2.2 Turn on power
3.Check water in kettle NA
4.Switch Kettle off NA
5.Pour water 5.1 Lift kettle
5.Pour water 5.2 Direct spout
5.Pour water 5.3 Tilt kettle
5.Pour water 5.4 Replace kettle

Note that we didn’t put the main task (0) yet.

Import the data

Now we’ll import our HTA table to R.

library(readxl) # tp read excel files
library(data.tree) # to convert table to node like shape
library(networkD3) # to create network 
library(collapsibleTree) # to create tree

HTA <- read_excel("~/R/HTA.xlsx") # read the spreadsheet into R
HTA$pathString <- paste("Boil a kettle", # adding the main task
                            HTA$level1, # adding the path string to our HTA table 
                            HTA$Level2, 
                            sep = "/")
HTAtree <- as.Node(HTA) # convert the table to node

Output format

Table format

HTAtree
                      levelName
1  Boil a kettle               
2   ¦--1.Fill Kettle           
3   ¦   ¦--1.1.Take to tap     
4   ¦   ¦--1.2.Turn on water   
5   ¦   ¦--1.3.Check level     
6   ¦   ¦--1.4.Turn off water  
7   ¦   °--1.5.Take to socket  
8   ¦--2.Switch Kettle on      
9   ¦   ¦--2.1 Plug into socket
10  ¦   °--2.2 Turn on power   
11  ¦--3.Check water in kettle 
12  ¦   °--NA                  
13  ¦--4.Switch Kettle off     
14  ¦   °--NA                  
15  °--5.Pour water            
16      ¦--5.1 Lift kettle     
17      ¦--5.2 Direct spout    
18      ¦--5.3 Tilt kettle     
19      °--5.4 Replace kettle

Tree format

plot(HTAtree)

customized tree format

SetGraphStyle(HTAtree, rankdir = "TB")
SetEdgeStyle(HTAtree, arrowhead = "vee", color = "grey35", penwidth = 2)
SetNodeStyle(HTAtree, style = "filled,rounded", shape = "box", fillcolor = "GreenYellow", 
    fontname = "helvetica", tooltip = GetDefaultTooltip)
SetNodeStyle(HTAtree$`3.Check water in kettle`, fillcolor = "LightBlue", penwidth = "5px")
plot(HTAtree)

Network format

HTAnet <- ToDataFrameNetwork(HTAtree, "name")
simpleNetwork(HTAnet[-3], fontSize = 12)

Tree format

collapsibleTreeSummary(HTA, hierarchy = c("level1", "Level2"), root = "0  Boil kettle")

Creidit

Christoph Glur for creating the data.tree package and for his toutrial on how to use it.