Editing Data

Changing values and display formatting

Omniscope is a very powerful visual tool for detecting and 'scrubbing' errors and making changes to your data. Once you have imported all the 'raw' data from various sources, you can use Omniscope to ensure the completeness and correctness of the data following the Data Management phase checklist. Topics:

Editing Cell Values - the Table View permits you to edit values in data sets at individual cell, value or column level using familiar keyboard shortcut commands

Rows & Columns - adding and deleting rows and columns, setting column orders, configuring row height etc.

Dates & times - specifying and changing the format of data stored in your source files as imported Omniscope date & time values.

Note: Omniscope does not currently support time durations as data values. If you are managing time durations, you must either import start & stop times & dates and let Omniscope calculate durations, or use and display durations as decimal numbers, e.g. 3.5 = 3 hours and 30 minutes

Tokenised data - using data sets with more than one value (or image) per cell, i.e. one to many relationships in 'flat' data sets

Time Series - Omniscope stores repeated observations over time as rows (not columns). Consult this section if you plan to create time-series displays from your data set.

Placing markers - Omniscope enables you to add or edit geographic coordinates associated with a map manually. Use this approach to check your geographic coordinates, add missing coordinates, and refine the coordinate columns in your data set by referencing highly detailed online mapping resources such as Google Earth/Maps.

Data entry - see the Details View to learn how this view can be configured as a data entry screen and added to any tab. Use formulae fields to set validations, and use Source IOK visualisations to 'flag' invalid inputs. Export/post edited data as corrections files/tables using web services and other methods.

Keyboard shortcuts

WARNING: Depending on your data source(s), you may or may not be able to directly write-back or synchronise your changes with the linked source of your file, such that your changes will survive future file data refreshes (see below). In the case of direct database connections, we do not recommend writing manual changes directly back to the relational source tables. However, unless you follow an agreed manual corrections file export/import procedure, the next time you refresh your Omniscope file from its database source, some of your data edits could be replaced with the as yet uncorrected contents of the source database.

Use the DataManager workspace to specify changes to data pending correction of the data in the source databases. This will ensure that your changes are repeatly applied on each refresh/recalculation, ensuring that Reports are always correct even if the source data remains uncorrected.

To preserve data not contained or being corrected in the source database, you can divide your data set into two parts, one Source IOK file with the same fields as the database and that refreshes directly from the database, and another IOK merge file that holds your local data as edited. Following each refresh, the merge will be repeated, preserving the local data held in the IOK merge file from being overwritten by blank columns from the database refresh of the Source IOK file.