Importing International Data

Differences in formatting of data for presentation around the world can affect data import and display in Omniscope. Many international issues affecting data import have been addressed in recent versions, all of which are free upgrades. If you are experiencing problems with dates, thousands separators, etc., please ensure you are running version 2.2 or better.

Common issues

When importing data by opening a .CSV or Excel .XLS file, Omniscope analyses the data in the file to determine how the data is arranged and which fields (columns) are most likely of data type Text, Numbers, or Dates & Times. The regional settings in your computer's operating system (Windows, or Mac, etc.) have a strong influence on this operation. For some combinations of settings and data formats, Omniscope cannot reliably detect the situation automatically. If you find your data opens incorrectly and your fields are not correctly structured, your numbers have the wrong decimal place, etc. consult the File > Open file...Open Data Set wizard page, which contains options to help with some common issues further described below:

Data File delimiters-.CSV stands for "Comma Separated Values", which means the cells in each record (row) of the data table are separated by the comma character. However, if you are in a region that also uses the comma in numbers instead of 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 multi-column tables files are saved with a .CSV or even a .TXT extension. Omniscope is unable to detect this situation 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 avoid this problem, use the Data Import wizard Customise data import dialog to change the Separator character to a semicolon " ; ".

Dates & Numbers- If you are running on Windows, when importing data that is in a delimited text format such as Excel .XLS, .CSV or .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 data type Text (shown in Omniscope either as multi-coloured Category columns or white Text columns). If this occurs, you can usually manually convert fields (columns) containing numbers or dates and times using the Edit > Manage fields dialog. For more information on formatting dates and times and managing time zones, 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... check boxes on the Open Data Set dialog. All fields will open as Category or Text data and their text values will be preserved. You can then use Edit > Manage fields to configure each field (column) as you would like it to display.

Back to Configure your Data