Import File Requirements

  • The Import File functionality supports the following file types (that this is a subset of the old file upload functionality):
    • .csv file
    • Excel (.xls, .xlsx) with MS Office 97-2003, excluding crosstab and password-protected files
    • Excel (.xls, .xlsx) with MS Office 2007-2013, excluding crosstab and password-protected files
    • ZIP (.zip) files of the above, without password protection
  • Scheduling file imports is not supported.
  • ZIP files with password protection are not supported.
  • International characters (multi-byte) are supported.
  • File Import has the same limits as usual, 20MB.

Note these additional requirements:

  • Excel files that are password-protected are not supported.
  • Crosstab Excel files are not supported.
  • File and sheet (tab) names with these characteristics are automatically changed in Modeler:
    • Leading and trailing spaces will be replaced by underscores (_)
    • The characters periods (.), asterisk (*), back slashes (\), forward slashes (/), colons (:), question marks (?), single quote marks ('), quote marks ("), less than (<), greater than (>), and pipe (|), will be replaced by underscores(_)
  • An Excel sheet (tab) becomes a table in Modeler. A file with multiple sheets results in multiple tables.
  • Birst has no percentage or currency datatypes, so a column formatted as percentage in Excel does not appear as expected in Birst.
  • Modeler uses the first non-empty row of a sheet to create the table column names.
  • There are limitations on column names and Modeler will change the content accordingly:
    • Modeler does not support Excel files that have double tildes (~~) in either the file name or in any workbook or sheet name.
    • These characters are deleted from column names: tilde (~), acute (`), asterisk (*), left and right parenthesis, (()), plus (+), equals (=), pipe (|), left and right brackets ({}), left and right square braces ([]), single quote mark ('), double quote mark ("), question mark (?), period (.), and comma (,)
    • For Excel file imports, column names that contain only the unsupported characters listed above will be named "sourceName Column1", "sourceName Column2", etc. Modeler generates the column names when data exists in the first 100 rows of the source.
    • Leading or trailing spaces are removed.
    • These characters are supported: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, _, !, @, #, $, %, ^, &, \, -, :, ;, /, <, >