Troubleshooting
Data imports must be properly formatted for Datawisp to load them correctly. A few common pitfalls are:
Incorrect Position of Data
Incorrect Headers
Uncommon (or missing) Separators
Extraneous Information
1. Incorrect Position of Data
When opened in a spreadsheet (google sheets, excel, etc) properly formatted csv documents start in cell A1, the upper left hand corner.
Correct:
Incorrect:
To remedy these issues, you can delete the empty rows and columns, or select and copy your data into a new spreadsheet starting at A1.
2. Incorrect Headers
Datawisp needs column headers to use as column names. This can be seen in a spreadsheet, or by opening your document in notepad or similar.
Correct:
Notice that regardless of the column type (numeric, string, etc) the first full row are strings describing the data you see in the rest of the column.
incorrect:
Compare to here where the first row is the dataset, without a header column. A good indicator of this is if your numeric columns seem to have numeric entries in row 1. Column headers are rarely numeric.
3. Uncommon (or missing) Separators
In contrast to diagnosing the first two issues, this is easier to diagnose in notepad or some other text editor. Open your csv in one of these editors and ctrl+f to find the character "," (a comma). There should be one separating every "cell" of data. Once you see you have a comma or a tab separating your data, you can open in a spreadsheet to be certain the number of rows and columns are consistent throughout the data, which is usually a symptom of an incorrect separator
correct:
Notice how a comma separates each column of the data, multiple consecutive columns indicate missing data.
incorrect:
Notice here there are no clear separators for columns. While it might appear to be spaces separating columns, note above some entries like "Ground Plane" are a single entry, whereas without comas it would be unclear.
4. Extraneous Information
In spreadsheet tools, it's not uncommon to have a dataset, and then do calculations in the same sheet over to the side or below the dataset. This creates many issues for a csv. When saving a spreadsheet as a csv, ensure there is only a single dataset in the sheet, and that the datset is complete. Having extra text or calculations in other places on the sheet could cause unexpected behaviors throughout the document.
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