Drag and drop an Excel file
1. Overview
This article shows you how to display data from a Microsoft Excel file using simple drag-and-drop operations in Dundas BI. This also works for other file data sources such as Access, flat files such as CSV, or XML files.
2. Drag an Excel file to the Explore window
This example depicts these steps followed in a new dashboard created from the main menu, but you can follow the same steps in a new metric set.
Locate your Excel file in Windows Explorer or Finder, then drag and drop it into the Explore window in Dundas BI.
The Excel file is automatically imported into Dundas BI as a data connector.
Expand the Data Connectors folder in the Explore window to see the auto-generated data connector for the Excel file. You can further expand the data connector to see any sheets and tables found in the file, and the column structure of each sheet.
Drag an Excel sheet from the Explore window to the canvas. A table visualization appears which displays the contents of the Excel sheet.
3. Drag an Excel file directly to the canvas
Optionally, you can drag an Excel file from your computer and drop it directly onto the canvas of the dashboard when editing, or onto a new metric set.
The Excel file will also be added as a data connector in the Explore window as shown above, but a table visualization will automatically appear on the canvas displaying data from one of the file's sheets.
4. Remove a column from the table
If the Data Analysis Panel is not visible next to the visualization, select Data Analysis Panel in the toolbar or from the right-click menu.
In the Data Analysis Panel, remove the 'x' column by clicking the x icon to its right.
5. Replace date column with time hierarchy level
Expand the Time Dimensions folder in the Explore window.
Expand the default time dimension and also its first hierarchy.
Drag the Month level of the hierarchy and drop it onto your existing date column in the Data Analysis Panel.
The table visualization is updated to group the dates into months and display the month names in the 'date' column.
6. Re-visualize as a bar chart
Finally, select the table, click Re-Visualize from the toolbar, and then click Bar. The table is now displayed as a bar chart with month names along the X axis.
7. Notes
Dragging and dropping a file to the application will upload the file.
- For updates to the file to take effect, you must either edit the data connector and upload a new file, or specify a URL or path to access the file in the data connector settings. See Connecting to Excel for more information.
- An uploaded file will be automatically warehoused after the first use to improve performance.
- You can download an uploaded file. Right-click the checked-in data connector from the Explore window or main menu and select Download File.