Acquiring data

You acquire data by copying it from a data source to a local dataset.

When acquiring data, the application displays a preview of it, parses the data, and analyzes the columns to determine their data type and uniqueness.
Note

Your input table forExpert Analytics must contain unique column names. The application does not consider columns with same names, but different letter cases, as unique.

Objects representing columns are proposed as either dimensions or measures. You can manually hide some types of columns, based on the column name and data properties.
Note The maximum number of cells that can be acquired is determined by the capacity of your computer. A warning message displays when an acquisition includes 30 million cells for 64-bit operating systems or 15 million cells for 32-bit operating systems.
Depending on the data source, data can be adapted before acquisition to include or remove columns, dimensions, measures, variables, and input parameters. Some data sources have additional options, such as formatting data, naming and trimming columns, and specifying column-name prefixes.
Table 1: Supported data sources

Data source

Description

Microsoft Excel

Loads an Excel worksheet as a dataset

Text file

Loads a text file (.csv or .txt) as a dataset

Clipboard

Creates a dataset from data that was copied to the clipboard

SAP HANA

Downloads data from SAP HANA (offline)

Connects to SAP HANA (online)

SAP BusinessObjects universe

Downloads data from SAP BusinessObjects universe files (.unv and .unx)

Query with SQL

Runs freehand SQL on a database, to download a dataset

After acquiring a dataset, you can add or remove columns, dimensions, measures, and variables in it.