The node is dedicated to ease the processing of microscope or plate reader data. It loades meta information and/or layout data from a sheet of an Excel file which follows a specific formatting. The sheet can contain different layers of information (e.g. compound name, compound concentration, ...).
The first layer has to start at C5 in the Excel sheet. This position contains the layer name (used as column names in the output table). The next row (starting at D6) contains the plate column numbers (1,2,3,...), while column 5 (starting at C7) contains the plate row identifier (A,B,C,... or 1,2,3,...). The dimensions are limited to 1536 well format (32 rows, 48 columns). Dimensions have to be the same for all layers. Within the area defined by plate row and column identifiers cells can contain metainformation of different data types (string, double, integer) or left empty.
The next layer starts again with its name in column C with a gap of 2 rows to the previous layer. Each layer will result in a new column of the output table.
For a screen shot and a download of an example file look here: HCS-Tools Wiki