Pulling the information from an Excel spreadsheet may not be needed in your particular case. It depends on the workflow you’d like to have. Again, the purpose of this graph was to illustrate a general concept. Like you said, determining a naming convention for the alignments is likely a project-specific task. If you want to give the user control of the order, one idea would be to use the Select Objects node from the Civil 3D Toolkit and tell the user to select the polylines in the order that they want.