Prepare and Import Your Data

Data Illustrateur currently supports tabular data formatted as csv (comma-separated values) files, with the assumption that the first row contains the column names.

The same dataset can have a long format and a wide format. For example, Table 1 shows the 2012 Summer Olympic medal table dataset in the long form. Table 2 shows a wide form of the same dataset, where each of the medal type values (Gold, Silver, Bronze) is a column.

The current version of Data Illustrateur supports the long format. Wikipedia has a high level explanation of the differences between long and wide forms of data. For a more technical discussion, refer to Section 3 of “Tidy Data” by Hadley Wickham.

To import your own dataset, click the “Import Data” button in the Data Panel, and choose your file in the dialog. Data Illustrateur parses the data file, infers the data type for each column, and displays the column names and summaries in the Data Panel. Only the top 500 rows of data are shown for large datasets.