You now need to understand your data. For this quick start guide, your data is in this BusinessData.xls file, which you need to download to your computer.
Watch the Video
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Summary of Steps
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Before you start building any PhixFlow |
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application, it is important to |
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understand your data and what you need to do with it. |
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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 |
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easy 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. |
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Create an analysis model
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Load the Excel file |
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Your model now looks like this (with your initials after the names).
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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 ... |
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You now need to load the spreadsheet that contains the data into your application.
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In the stream properties on the right, set:
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- 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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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.
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You are now ready for step 3, create a user screen, which will display this data to your application users.