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The Metric

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The Metric System explores interesting uses of data analysis in business and the world at large. The Metric System is maintained by RJMetrics.

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RJMetrics Feature Spotlight: Advanced Data Exports

  
  
  

The RJMetrics business dashboard is so comprehensive that we hate to think of our customers using any other application for analysis. However, we understand that occasionally, for one reason or another, everyone needs to plop some raw data into Excel or another external app.

As such, we’ve significantly expanded our “Export Data” functionality to include CSV (comma separated value), XLS (Excel 2003), XLSX (Excel 2007), and PDF (Adobe Document Reader) formats.

There are two ways to access the “Export Data” feature, depending on whether you would like to export the data behind a single chart or an entire dashboard. To extract a single chart’s data, simply click the “Export Data” link at the bottom of the chart:

Click "Export Data" to export the data behind any chart

Click "Export Data" to export the data behind any chart

To extract an entire dashboard’s data, simply click the “Export” link in the “Dashboard Options” section (on the top-right edge of any dashboard):

dashop2

Use the "Export" link to export an entire dashboard

After clicking either of these links, you prompted to choose your desired data format:

Several formats are available for exported chart data

Several formats are available for exported chart data


After choosing your desired format, simply click “Export” and the download will begin. You will notice that only Excel formats are available for exporting entire dashboards, since each chart’s data will exist on its own tab within the Excel workbook:

Each chart's data appears on its own tab

Each chart's data appears on its own tab in Excel

We hope this update makes life easier for all of our fellow data geeks out there. Stay tuned for more cool features!

Comments

 
Martin said... 
I've always had a particular problem with exporting to CSV and would love to hear your take on it. How do you maintain the right delimiting when you're exporting text values with commas in them to CSV? 
Was just curious :)
Posted @ Friday, October 21, 2011 12:38 PM by Gaston Burthey
 
robertjmoore said... 
It's easy: you just need a convention for enclosing field content and escaping special characters. 
For example, we typically enclose each field in double-quotes and escape any double-quotes in the field content with slashes (\). If we want to include a single slash in your field, we escape that as well (\\). 
 
When importing a CSV, Excel will ask you to specify these special characters. 
 
Example: 
"Name", "Title" 
"Marty Angert, Sr.", "The \"Bad Boy\" of VC"
Posted @ Friday, October 21, 2011 12:39 PM by Gaston Burthey
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