Importing Excel spreadsheets into Spotfire

The procedures for importing comma-separated values (CSV) files or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets in Spotfire are essentially identical:

1. From the Spotfire home page (shown initially when launching the Analyst or web clients), select Browse local file...:

1. You will be presented with a standard Open File dialog, allowing you to navigate to the file that you want to load. For this example, let's use some publicly available data on the Titanic disaster—it can be downloaded from the following link:
   http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/pub/Main/DataSets/titanic3.xls
   or: http://bit.ly/2HStQ7R.

1. In the Analyst client, Spotfire will open a dialog, which will allow you to define the import settings:

1. The first thing to notice is the Worksheet selection dropdown at the very top of the dialog window. Spotfire can only import one worksheet at a time. There is only one sheet in our file, so we don't need to do anything with this option.
2. The next thing to notice is the preview of the data and its structure. Spotfire will automatically detect and assign column headers and data types, but you can change any of these settings. You can also tell Spotfire not to import specific columns or rows.
3. We want to open the file with all defaults, so we're just going to click OK, but please do explore the drop-down options for columns and rows and experiment with the settings. The core philosophy of Spotfire is discovery, so start as you mean to continue and explore some of the options.
4. Once you click OK, Spotfire will show the Add data to analysis display:

1. Click OK to load the data.