The Interpretation Spreadsheet
Right-click any interpretation group in the tree → Spreadsheet View to see every object in it as a row. The properties panel shows one object at a time, which is the wrong tool for deciding which of two hundred measurements to trust; the spreadsheet puts them side by side and sorts on any column when you click its header.
Polylines, faults, orientations and geopolygons all share the same builder, so the columns below are common to them — an orientation and the polyline it was fitted from report the same geometry in the same way.
The columns follow the order the CSV export writes them, and clicking a header to sort changes the exported order too. See Import & Export for the file itself.
Choosing what is shown
Right-click inside the grid → Properties to toggle whole groups of columns. Each tick-box below controls the block of the same name in the tables that follow.
| Tick-box | Turns on |
|---|---|
| Record ID | The object's database identifier |
| Names | The object name |
| Group Name | The group it belongs to |
| Tree Path | Where it sat in the interpretation tree |
| Position | X, Y, Z |
| Orientation | Dip and dip direction, plus strike and the fit-quality block |
| Fit Quality | Error, both pairs of shape ratios, the grade and the node count |
| Polyline Stats | Length, chord, plunge, tortuosity and the corrected dimensions |
| Geopolygon Stats | Area, thickness and bounding dimensions (geopolygons only) |
| All Vertices | One row per node instead of one row per object |
| Fill common values | Repeat the object's summary values on every vertex row rather than leaving them blank |
| Separator | A blank marker row between objects |
Identity
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Record ID | The object's identifier in the project database. Read-only |
| Name | The object's name. Editable — changing it here renames it in the tree |
| Group | The group the object belongs to. Read-only |
| Path | The object's position in the interpretation tree, so a flat export can be put back together |
Position
For a normal row this is the object's own position — for an orientation, where its disc is anchored. With All Vertices on, each row carries the position of one node.
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| X, Y, Z | Coordinates in the project's coordinate system, in model units. Editable — typing a value moves the object |
Orientation
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Dip | Angle of maximum inclination from horizontal, 0–90°. Editable |
| Dip Direction | Compass bearing of that maximum dip, 0–360°. Editable |
| Strike (0-180) | Strike folded into a half circle, which is what the rose diagram plots. Derived from dip direction, so read-only |
Fit quality
Every column here is an output of the same best-fit solve, so all of them are read-only. They are what How good is the pick? describes, and the thresholds come from Tavani et al. (2024) Table 2.
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Error | RMS scatter of the nodes about the fitted plane, in degrees. Bigger is worse. A 3-node pick has no scatter, so it reports how thin its triangle is instead, and 90° if the three points were collinear |
| Colinearity | Fernández's K, ln(λ₁/λ₂) / ln(λ₂/λ₃). Lower is better; below 0.8 is his reliability bar |
| Coplanarity | Fernández's M, ln(λ₁/λ₃). Higher is flatter; above 4 the nodes sit within roughly 6° of the plane |
| Tavani Collinearity | λ₁/λ₂. Lower is better — below 30 excellent, below 100 good. The only one of the paper's nine trace properties that tracked how far the fitted plane ended up from true bedding |
| Tavani Coplanarity | (λ₁ + λ₂ + λ₃)/λ₃. Higher is better — above 5000 excellent, above 2000 good |
| Grade | excellent, good or rejected — the worst of the collinearity, coplanarity, node-count, trace-length and node-spacing tests |
| Nodes | How many nodes were digitised. 12 or more is excellent, 8 or more good; below 8 Table 2 rejects the trace whatever its geometry |
An orientation nothing ever fitted — typed in by hand, or imported as a bare dip and
azimuth — leaves the Tavani columns, the grade and the node count empty. A
coplanarity of 0 would read as the worst possible fit and rejected as a verdict it
never earned. The full definitions of every ratio are in the
Attributes reference.
Polyline statistics
Measured on the digitised nodes, so they describe the trace rather than the plane through it. All read-only.
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Polyline Length | Distance along the line, summed segment by segment in 3D, in model units |
| Chord Length | Straight-line 3D distance from the first node to the last. Note the CSV writes a map chord instead, measured in plan view |
| Difference in Z | Height change from the first node to the last. Signed, so a line digitised the other way reverses it |
| Average Plunge Dip | Inclination of the line's mean direction, for a trace treated as a linear feature rather than a plane |
| Average Plunge Direction | Compass bearing of that mean direction |
| Tortuosity | Polyline Length ÷ Chord Length. Exactly 1 for a straight line and rising with how much the trace wanders — a useful sanity check, since a trace with a tortuosity of 1 is the collinear case that fits the outcrop face rather than the discontinuity |
Corrected dimensions
Orientation sheets add four more. These are measured in the plane's own frame — the nodes are rotated by the measured dip and dip direction until the plane lies flat, and the extents are taken along its own axes — which is what "corrected" means here. A bedding trace on a steep face therefore reports its true size on the bedding surface, not its foreshortened world-axis bounding box.
After that rotation the trace's own directions are the axes: strike runs along X, the dip direction along Y, and the plane's normal along Z.
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Corrected Length | Extent along strike, in model units |
| Corrected Height | Extent down dip, in model units. With Length, this is the size of the patch on the surface itself |
| Corrected Width | Extent perpendicular to the plane — how far the nodes depart from being flat, in model units. This is the out-of-plane scatter as a distance, where Coplanarity is the same idea as a ratio |
| Enclosing Sphere Diameter | Diameter of the smallest sphere containing every node. The overall size of the patch in one number, independent of its shape |
Attributes
Any key/value attributes you have attached to the group appear as further columns, one per attribute, named as you named them. They are editable, so the spreadsheet is usually the fastest way to populate an attribute across many objects at once.
See also
- How good is the pick? — where the grade comes from and what to do about a poor one.
- Attributes — the full definitions of the eigenvalue ratios, and the equivalent measures for meshes and point clouds.
- Import & Export — writing these columns to a file.