Import data from a CSV file

A CSV file contains tabular data separated by a delimiter, typically (but not always) a comma. The comma, the semicolon (;) and the tab character are the only delimiters that are supported.

Here's a tiny CSV file with three fields—Date, Review and City—separated by a comma. The first row is a list of field names and each subsequent row contains a record. In this case, a record is a comment made on a given date about a certain apartment rental.

Date,Review,City
2014-05-30,"Very cute place in the BEST location possible",Madrid
2016-02-19,"Lovely views and filled with light",Montreal
2012-07-10,"The apartment was nice and matched the photographs",Berlin
2014-06-23,"Amazing place with breathtaking view of downtown",San Francisco

Date fields are not mandatory, but you need at least one to filter by date or look for time trends. It can be named anything; it should be detected automatically if it has a valid format.

Add the CSV file to your sources

You should run your file through a tool like CSV Lint to make sure it's well-formed. Be careful if you're trying to validate private data—CSV Lint keeps a public list of validation reports for data uploaded through a URL.
Your CSV file cannot exceed 100 MB and must be encoded in UTF-8. Additionally, make sure it uses a carriage return and a line feed (CRLF) for new lines.
  1. Click the icon in the sidebar.
  2. Under Active sources, click the box with the + sign.
  3. Click Choose File, find your file and click Open.
  4. Give your source a name and a description (optional).

Our solution will look at your data and try to figure out what the delimiter is, what the fields are and what data types are used (numbers, dates, etc). It's usually pretty good at this, but sometimes it makes mistakes, so double-check everything.

You can pick (optionally) a primary date field and a customer ID field. With a primary date, our solution detects time trends, and with customer IDs, it guesses the number of customers affected by an issue, but both are completely optional. Currently, they can't be changed once you create your source.

All that's left is deciding which fields need to be analyzed. Check or uncheck fields as you please, but keep in mind that you need to analyze at least one field and its data type must be String.

When you're done, click Add source and sit back while your CSV file is being read.

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