Define Your Data

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 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.

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.

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How to

Step 1 Connect PhixFlow to the data source

In the repository, add a new analysis model and set Basic Settings > Name to Businesses
To open the model in the workspace, click the toolbar button Display.
To load the Excel file, drag a File Collector from the model toolbar into the model and set Basic Settings > Name: Business-File, then Save the properties.
In the model, hover your mouse pointer over the file collector. PhixFlow displays a pop-up toolbar. Click Upload File . Browse to the Excel file.
In the upload window, click the button. Your model should now look like this.

Explore the possibilities

To make it really easy to load data from Excel files, PhixFlow automatically sets many of properties. You can see that there are many options that you can use to load different types of data from file.

Step 2 Set the data properties

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 OK.
In the stream properties toolbar, click Save then click on the
_pin
Pin
to keep the stream properties
open.

Explore the possibilities

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.

Step 3 Import the data

Hover over the BusinessData stream and select Run Analysis, 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 Stream Views then select Default View. PhixFlow displays the data it has loaded into the stream.