Microsoft Excel can be a powerful tool in manipulating and analyzing your data that you collect with Fulcrum. We here at Fulcrum use open and well known data formats. UTF-8 is the standard for the web. Unfortunately, Microsoft Excel has its own preference for data encodings. You can use Microsoft Excel’s import tool to massage your data in to working with Excel.

Once you have Microsoft Excel 2007 open:

• Click on the Data menu bar option.
• Next, click on the From Text icon.

• Now, navigate to the location of the .CSV file you exported from Fulcrum.  Click on the filename and then click on the Import button.

• Choose the delimited file type and Choose 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) from the drop-down list.

• Check the “Comma” delimiter, which is what was used in the data exporter file.  The Data preview window will show you how your data will appear.

• Now, choose the appropriate data format for each column of data that you want to import.  You also have the option to not import one or more columns of data if you want.

• Finally, click on the Finish button to finish importing your data into Microsoft Excel.

Now all of your data will be imported properly into Excel and it will avoid any of the strange issues that come from document encoding changes. You now have the full power of Microsoft Excel to analyze, manipulate and massage your data.

Microsoft Excel is a very powerful tool for analytics, it can be used to generate practically every type of table and graph possible, even pivot tables. What sort of features to you like to use in Excel? For me, I love the radar charts! They allow you to analyze multivariate data in a quick  and easy to read format.