Opening files

CSV Easy supports two styles of input files. CSV (Comma Separated Values) and Fixed Width. To begin click the Open File icon on the toolbar or select File > Open file from the menu.

CSV

You choose your source file from either the history drop down menu or by clicking the dotted button to popup a file selection dialog. CSV Easy will attempt to discover the format of the file. You may also override this by choosing the appropriate Delimiter and Qualifier characters to use.

Line break allows you to specify what line break characters are used in your file. Generally Automatic will suffice, but if you have a non windows format file it may be beneficial to force the line break. Also if you have carriage returns or line breaks in the middle of the data forcing the real line break will help avoid premature line break detection.

Having First row contains column header set will tell CSV Easy to take the first usable row of your source file and extract columns names from it. Without this selected a formulated set of column names will be used in the form of F1,F2,F3 etc...

Preserve linebreaks in columns is used to maintain linebreak characters found within a qualified columns data. This often occurs when a column represents an address block or notes field from a database where the user was allowed to put hard returns into the data.

Trim white space around column names will make sure the column names have any extra leading or trailing white space removed.

Force unique column names will alter a column name if a duplicate one already exists. It does this in the form of adding a trailing number to the end starting at 1 until it makes the column unique.

Fixed Width

As with CSV's you select the source file by browsing for it or selecting a previous file from the drop down history. The file will be scanned to show you a sample of the data in a grid (20 records). In some cases this sample of data is not enough. Clicking Full Scan will read the entire source file building a sample set representing all the different lengths of records from your file.

Now you define the start points of each column in the file. You do this by double clicking the column on the grid where you want a column to start. It will turn red and the header row will have an star above it.

CBD

CBD is the internal format a working file is kept in by CSV Easy. With this tab you can browse for a cbd file and open it. There are no other options for this format as all the settings for the file are stored within the cbd. The main advantage of this format is the speed at which you can load a very large file without having to process the raw text file again. See also saving a cbd file.

Common options

Text Mode determines what character set (code page) your data is defined in. CSV Easy will use your operating systems default character set initially. If you are working with a file from a different country of origin use this drop down to change the format.

It is often useful to load just a sample of the source data to determine if the options are set correctly before committing to the whole file. Clicking on Limit to the first x rows allows you to do just that.

Finally Skip the first x rows is very useful if the file you are loading has some sort of irrelevant header that holds no real data. Ticking this option will allow you to enter the number of rows to skip before processing begins.

Clicking Open will now load the file. You will be given progress throughout the load and estimated finish times.