Getting started with the CSV data source

Most of the time, the dashboards we create are querying data from SQL databases, Web APIs or large backend systems. Sometimes though, we might want to visualize an ad hoc data set – and this is where the SquaredUp CSV plugin really shines. You can create powerful dashboards just by pointing to the path of a CSV file, or even just paste your CSV data into a text box.

There is a huge amount of useful data that is made publicly available on the web, and for this article we are going to use data on visits to leading UK museums published by the UK Department for Culture Media and Sport. Let’s get started!

Adding the data source

The image below is a screenshot of our CSV file. As you can see the columns represent the months in 2024, the rows represent the museums and the numerical values are the visitor numbers:

The first thing we are going to do is create a new dashboard and then select the CSV Data Source:

You will see that we now have the option of two Data Streams – you can either select a specific file location or just paste in raw text.

Our data lives in a file on a shared drive which is accessible via a web URL. We are therefore going to select the File option:

As soon as we enter the URL, SquaredUp will retrieve our data and display it in a table:

Shaping your data

I would like to sort the table alphabetically by museum name and I can do this very easily in the Shaping Step:

If we now click on Save, we will see the table on our dashboard:

Naturally, when using the CSV data source, all of the usual SquaredUp visualizations are available to you. So let’s create a line graph to see the month by month visitor trend for the British Museum.

Creating a line graph

We will click on the Edit button, add a new tile and then once again select the CSV data source. This time I am going to select a transformed version of the file, which has the data consolidated into three columns.

As before, we will select the File Data Stream and enter the URL of our file. Next we will add a filter so that we are just looking at data for the British Museum:

If we look at the Columns view, we can see that our month column has been interpreted as a string rather than a date field:

This is not a problem. We can let SquaredUp know that this needs to be treated as a date field by defining the input format:

Next, we select the Line Graph visualization:

And then we can define the mappings for our line graph:

And here is our final dashboard:

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