Open data file

File > Open file...importing data from files

Opening and importing data from de-limited data files

Omniscope can open most common delimited data files and tagged XML files suitably transformed. Clicking on File > Open file brings up the Open file dialog, which looks similar to a Windows file browse dialog:

File > Open dialog: Most source data files in Excel XLS, CSV, TSV and other common delimited text data file formats will open directly in Omniscope. The Help icon in the upper right displays a format guide for importing spreadsheet files. Always confirm that your spreadsheets conform to this simple layout before trying to open them in Omniscope. If you have problems, such as all the values appearing in one column, you may need to change the delimiter or rename a tab-delimited file extension from TXT to TSV. If only some of the data fields (columns) have not separated cleanly, you can use the Expand or Collapse Values functions in the Table View Tools menu to separate data into more columns or combine data from multiple columns into fewer columns.

If you encounter problems importing data from one or more files, see also the KnowledgeBase section on importing and exporting data to and from supported data files.

Note: Importing XML files requires that the file be transformed to a single tabular structure in our schema (see below).

Opening remote data files

Opening remote data files over the web -
If the source data file you want to open is not on your machine or local network, you can use the Open from Web button to specify the exact location (URL) of the data file you wish to import.

Customise data import

Adapting to regional and non-standard data formatting -

If you are repeatedly using/importing other peoples' spreadsheets, you can depart from the recommended standard spreadsheet layout somewhat by ticking the Customise data import behaviour option and providing Omniscope with additional information about the layout of the data you are importing. For example, sometimes you may have a CSV, TSV or Excel XLS file which does not have the column headers on the first row. Without customisation, Omniscope will assume the first row contains headers, and include the actual column headers as the first row of data. To skip any number of redundant upper rows on file import, use the Skip first ?? rows box to enter the number of redundant (usually formatting) rows in your data file to be skipped before trying to read in the headers.

International data issues

Data File delimiters - the CSV file extension stands for "Comma Separated Values", which means the cells in each row of the data table are separated by the comma character. However, if you are in a region that also uses the comma for the decimal point (e.g. several European countries, such as France) some versions of Excel create CSV files that use a semicolon as the separator character. Sometimes these files are saved with a TXT rather than CSV extension, even though they are multi-column tables. Omniscope is unable to detect these situations automatically. If you open such a file in Omniscope, your data will very clearly be wrong, with most columns appearing as text with semicolons. To import this kind of file, use the Customise data import option dialog to change the Separator character to a semicolon " ; ". Pipe "|" delimited files can also be imported, but first you must re-save the file with a CSV extension, then use the option that appears to change the delimiter to "|".

Dates & Numbers - if you are running on Windows, when importing data that is in a delimited text format which includes Excel, CSV and TSV (tab-separated values), Omniscope will use your Windows Regional Settings to try to automatically recognise data. For example, for a PC with United States Regional Settings, Omniscope will recognise "5/13/2005" as a date and "1,500.5" as a number. For some international users, however, this may not work as expected and the result will be an import of all columns as type Text (shown either as multi-coloured Category columns or white Text columns in Omniscope). If this occurs, you can usually manually convert numbers and dates & times fields using the Data > Manage fields dialog. for more information on formatting dates & times, and dealing with time zone issues, see the section on Dates & Times.

If you know your data has been formatted for a different region, change the Locale drop-down accordingly. For example, if you live in Germany but have received a CSV from an American customer, you should choose 'English (US)'. If you find Omniscope gets things wrong and your data is incorrectly recognised, you can disable auto-detection of dates and numbers by deselecting the two Recognise...checkboxes. All fields will open as Category or Text data and their text values will be preserved. See the KnowledgeBase section for more on information on dealing with International data issues.

Importing XML files

Importing XML files which have already been transformed to Visokio XML Schema is the same as opening a CSV.

Transforming XML into Omniscope Schema -

If your XML file conforms to another schema, then you must prepare an XSL Transform file, tick Customise data import and specify that file to transform the non-Visokio XML file to Visokio XML schema for import. Your XSL Transform stylesheet can be accessed from any location, including the web, using the Enter web address (URL) option to specify the online location of the XSL file.

Note: if your XML data set is not already in a tabular structure, you must array it into a tabular structure using your XSL file.

Knowledge Base