Keywords part 2 - migration

In Part 1 we've covered the basic tools we'll need today in order to migrate existing meta data which lives in either a FlowJo workspace, or a spreadsheet.

Starting with a FlowJo workspace:

1. Open your workspace. You don't need the data files for this task, FYI - so if this is a "broken" workspace (ie. it lost link to source data after one or the other were moved) - it'll still work.
2. Make sure all pertinent keywords are showing in the workspace as columns.
3. click Edit menu/Copy samples as text.
4. go to your spreadsheet and paste the clipboard there. It should look like just like your workspace:

Tip: if your "paste"  ended up including gates  like below:

try collapsing all of the gates. To do this quickly, hold down the [cmd] key while you collapse one of the gates. This  will batch-collapse or batch-expand all gates.

From this point on, the instructions are identical with the next section (starting with a spreadsheet.)

Starting with a spreadsheet of keywords:
(this assumes the keywords' names are in one row and all their values are in columns)
(please note. this functionality has been changed since version 8.5.3. The procedure below will be possible only with 8.5.4b8 or better. Download FlowJo 8.5.4b8

1. In your spreadsheet, select the keyword values, excluding the keyword name. You can select multiple columns at a time.
2. go the "new" workspace. Double click the first cell corresponding to the same keyword in the new workspace - notice the cell appears as though you could type into it:

Tip: if you have four columns of keyword values selected, make sure that you have 3 more blank keyword columns next to the left-most one. If you don't - the values which cannot be pasted in will be dropped. Also - keywords which are not modifiable will not be processed - those columns will be ignored. These keywords include parameter names and scaling etc..

3. use the keyboard shortcut [cmd]+[v] to paste the clipboard. All values for all cells should appear in the workspace.

Tip: if you f****d up and pasted the wrong values in the wrong place, you can't undo, but you can paste over any existing values. So find the right cell and do the paste again. Also, if you need to quickly erase a whole column of wrong values, double-click any value in that column, erase it (backspace or delete) and hit [cmd]+[e] (applies current value to the whole column.

Tip: the new transferred meta data only exists for the current workspace. If you want to make it part of the FCS files permanently, select all files in the workspace and choose the 'export' command from the Workspace menu. The new data set will include the keyword changes.

That's it for part 2. In the next and final installment I'll show you how to batch-replace keywords using a scripting language of FlowJo's batch search/replace platform.