Before you start any PhixFlow project, it is important to take time to understand your data and what you need to do with it. For large projects this means detailed analysis using an Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD).
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 personeasy for the team to access and maintain the data. You also want to add some simple CRM functions, for example, to add descriptions about the business.
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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. The following video guides you through this process.
Download the Excel file
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| name | Demo Build Step 2 Define and Load Data.mp4 |
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| title | Step 1 Connect PhixFlow to the data sourceexisting data |
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Create an analysis model- In the repository, right-click Analysis Model and to create a new analysis model and set .
- Set Basic Settings > Name to
BusinessesTo open the model in the workspace, click the toolbar button and click model_displaymodel_display.To load - PhixFlow opens a new empty model on the left.
Load the Excel file, drag - Drag a
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from the model toolbar into the model and set . - Set Basic Settings > Name:
Business-FileBusinessData, then and click savesave the properties. - In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the file collector. PhixFlow displays a pop-up toolbar. Click
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. Browse and browse to the Excel file. In the upload window, click the | Insert excerpt |
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button. Your model should now look like this.
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| title | Explore the possibilities |
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To make it really easy to load data from Excel files| When you upload an Excel file, PhixFlow automatically sets many of the file collector and stream properties. |
You can see that there There are many options that you can use to load different types of data from file. To connect PhixFlow to databases you can use a| Insert excerpt |
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Your model now looks like this.  Image Added
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| title | Step 2 Set the data properties |
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In the stream properties on the right, set: - Basic Settings → Period to Transactional
- Tick Audit Manual Changes
- In the Attributes section, double-click
Description and change its Type to Bigstring then click Click finishfinish.In the stream properties toolbar, click and then click on thesavesave| nopanel | true |
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then click on the to keep the stream properties open. - In the Attributes section, double-click
Description and change its Type to Bigstring then click pinpin to keep the stream properties
open.
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| title | Explore the possibilities |
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| Look in the Attributes section. When you connect PhixFlow to the Excel spreadsheet, it automatically identifies the properties of the data columns (attributes) such as their type (string, numerical) and length. This also happens when you connect PhixFlow to data stored in databases. |
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| title | Step 3 Import the data |
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- Hover In the model on the left, hover over the BusinessData stream and select
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, then click Yes to confirm. - Close the confirmation messages.
- To check that the data has loaded into the stream, hover your mouse pointer over the stream and select
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then select | Insert excerpt |
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. PhixFlow displays the data it has loaded into the stream.
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- Close any remaining confirmation messages (the green boxes in the bottom left).
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You have now imported the spreadsheet data into PhixFlow.
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