Video: Importing Data into Navo

In this video we’re going to learn how to import data into Navo.

When you first open Navo (and when you hit the open button) you’re presented with the “Open Data Source” dialog. This allows you to select from files on disk, sample data, and recently opened data sets. Let’s browse to an Excel workbook. If you are interested, this is the same data set as what you get when you hit the “Sample Data” button in case you want to follow along at home.

And after it reads it for a second, it’ll bring up a new display - the “Customize” display.

This display has four tabs - “Data Source”, “Fields”, “Dimension Counts”, and “Report”. We’ll cover each briefly in turn now, but in more depth in later tutorials.

First is the “Data Source” tab. It’s got three sections across the top. The first shows me what file I’ve got open, how big it is, and when it was last changed. If I click on the hyperlinked spreadsheet name it’ll open up that sheet in Excel.

The second section tells me a little about the file - that it’s an Excel workbook and which sheet, rows and columns the data is in. If I need, I can pull down the sheet to select a different sheet in the workbook.

If you notice, Navo has started the data import with cell A4. That’s because Navo has detected some “header rows” - maybe a title or modification information, and has elected to skip it.

The third section tells me a little bit about my table - how many rows and columns there are in my selected sheet. It also has a checkbox to create a new field called “Excel Row”. We’ll talk about this in more depth in another tutorial, but in short, it creates a new column whose values are the number of the row in Excel.

Below that is a sample of the data set. We can see the columns and the first twenty or so rows of data. This can help us verify that we’re actually looking at the right stuff. If we’re not, we can either switch the sheet using this pulldown at the top, or open a different workbook altogether.

Next, at the top we have the second tab - Fields.

This brings us to the “Fields” dialog. This has three categories - Dimensions, Summaries, and Unassigned. If you want to learn more about what a Dimension and a Summary is, see our Tutorial on “What is a Dimension?”. For now, let’s just know that this is an excel spreadsheet, and there is probably some garbage in there. For example, I’ve got this column “Units”. I don’t really need that - Cases are more important anyway, so let’s get rid of it by hitting this little “x” button which moves it over to “Unassigned” - that means it won’t appear in any displays when we’re done.

I'm also going to drag Invoice Number, Customer Zip and Case Size from Summaries to Dimensions. I know from my excel spreadsheet that Invoice Numbers are unique identifiers for individual sales orders - not really something I want to add up. Adding up Zip codes is just silly, and Case Size is more useful as a way of breaking up data than as something to add up.

The Dimensions list is ordered. That means that whenever you see a list of dimensions, like when you go to Dive, or in “Available Dimensions” lists, they’ll be in the same order you put them here. If you want to change this order, just drag items up and down to put them where you want them.

Once I’m done and I’ve got all of my columns where I want them, I hit my OK button and it’ll bring up our first table.

In other videos we’ll talk about the last two tabs of the customize dialog - Dimension Counts and Report, but for now, this is all you need to know about importing data into Navo!