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For this example, a sales team is using an Excel spreadsheet to manage a list of customer businesses and associated contacts. You want to make it accessible and maintainable by more than one person. You also want to add some simple CRM functions, for example, to add descriptions about the business.

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How To

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The first step is to create a PhixFlow application. Everything you create will belong to this application.

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PhixFlow has many options that you can use to define the data, its properties and relationships. But if you already have data available you can quickly and easily load it into PhixFlow.

Expand
titleStep 1 Connect PhixFlow to the data source
  1. In your application, create model and set Basic Settings > Name enter: Businesses
  2. To open the model in the workspace, click the toolbar button
    Insert excerpt
    _model_display
    _model_display
    nopaneltrue
    .
  3. To load the Excel file, drag a 
    Insert excerpt
    _file_collector
    _file_collector
    nopaneltrue
     from the model toolbar into the model and set     Basic Settings > Name: Business-File, then  
    Insert excerpt
    _save
    _save
    nopaneltrue
     the properties.
  4. In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the file collector. PhixFlow displays a pop-up toolbar. Click 
    Insert excerpt
    _upload_file
    _upload_file
    nopaneltrue
    . Browse to the Excel file.
  5. In the upload window, click the  
    Insert excerpt
    _upload_button
    _upload_button
    nopaneltrue
     button. Your model should now look like this.
    Image Added


Expand
titleExplore the possibilities
For file collectors, when you configure no properties, other than the name, when you upload the file PhixFlow automatically sets the other properties. If you make any changes to any field, even if you then delete the change, PhixFlow assumes you want to configure the properties yourself.




Expand
titleStep 2 Set the data properties


In the stream properties on the right, set:

  1. Basic Settings → Period to Transactional
  2. Tick Audit Manual Changes
  3.  
    Insert excerpt
    _save
    _save
    nopaneltrue

...

  1.  Click on the pin to keep the stream properties
    open. You will need it later
Image Added


Expand
titleExplore the possibilities

Scroll down the properties tab. 

If you scroll down to the Grid section, you can see that there is a  Grid Header Style. This means that whenever PhixFlow displays data  in a grid (table), the table header will always have the same colour, font size and style. 

You can see there are lots of options where you can set data format and style defaults for the application. If none are set here, then PhixFlow uses defaults that are set for the system. This means that, all your applications have a consistent base line for the data and its styles, or you can apply defaults per-application, if you want them to look different

Look in the Attributes section

You can see that PhixFlow has identified all the properties of the data columns (attributes) such as the type and length. If you want to make any changes to these ...




Expand
titleDetails

You now need to load the spreadsheet that contains the data into your application. 

  • Open your application.
  • Right-click 
    Insert excerpt
    _model
    _model
    nopaneltrue
     and select 
    Insert excerpt
    _add
    _add
    nopaneltrue
    . PhixFlow opens a properties tab for the model.
  • In Basic Settings > Name enter: Businesses
  • In the toolbar for the tab, click 
    Insert excerpt
    _model_display
    _model_display
    nopaneltrue
    .
  • In the workspace on the left, PhixFlow opens an empty model.
  • To load the Excel file, drag a 
    Insert excerpt
    _file_collector
    _file_collector
    nopaneltrue
     from the model toolbar into the model. 
  • PhixFlow opens the properties for the file collector. Add a name: Business-File and 
    Insert excerpt
    _save
    _save
    nopaneltrue
     the properties.
  • In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the file collector. PhixFlow displays a pop-up toolbar. Click 
    Insert excerpt
    _upload_file
    _upload_file
    nopaneltrue
    . Browse to the Excel file.
  • In the upload window, click the  
    Insert excerpt
    _upload_button
    _upload_button
    nopaneltrue
     button.     This process
    • automatically configures the file collector properties to upload the file
    • creates a stream ready to hold the data. Streams are like PhixFlow's internal spreadsheets. 






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Expand
titleAdvanced or move?

Before you start any PhixFlow project, it is important to take time to understand your data.

  • What is your data? Do you need to represent people, places, products, money, time? These are the data entities.
  • How does the data connect? These connections are the data relationships.  
  • How will you represent the data in PhixFlow? This depends on the attributes the data has.
  • Is the data "clean" or do you need to tidy it up?
  • What data is missing?  PhixFlow can combine existing data from different sources and use it to calculate additional data.
  • What volume of data do you need to handle? For very large data volumes, you will be able to use modelling strategies to process data efficiently. 
  • What do you need to do with the data? What is the business problem you want to solve?

Remember that you can:

  • PhixFlow can connect to data stored in external databases (list or link?) or data files in a range of formats (list or link?)
  • PhixFlow analysis models are a powerful tool that you can use on any data project. Analysis models can help you to improve your data integrity, by 
    • identifying missing data, duplication and variation 
    • reconciling data in different files or systems.
  • The Introduction to Modelling Course shows how to do this
  • set up your own styles and palettes to create completely customised layouts. The Building Applications Course goes through this process.

You can represent your data and requirements in an Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD); see Wikipedia. It can help you to understand the data entities, their attributes and relationships. An ERD shows you the data architecture. As well as clarifying the data you already have and what you need to calculate, an ERD can help you identify:

  • static data: once added is unlikely to need updating. For example, the list of possible salutations:
    • Mr, Ms, Dr, Sir, Lord
  • control data, that PhixFlow uses for  screen input, for example data that is displayed in a drop-down list.
  • CRUD data, that PhixFlow will be able to create, read, update and delete.

Within PhixFLow it is a good idea to be consistent, at a minimum within an application. You can use prefixes to distinguish CRUD or control data from static data. During the planning phase you can set up a naming policy.

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