Excel

What you choose

The file. Drag an Excel workbook onto empty canvas and an Excel component appears with it, named after the file; or place one from the palette and drop the file on it. Drop a newer file on the same component to replace it — next month's export, say — and everything downstream follows.

What Fluidly decides

Which column means what. Fluidly reads the cells, not just the headers, and finds:

• Date — when each row happened, the axis every filter and chart reads.
• Amount — what moved on each row.
• Balance — the position after each row. If the sheet has none, it is walked from the amounts.
• Description — the text that tells rows apart, for Category and Classify.

It copes with what real exports look like: a title row above the table, blank lines, a cover sheet in front of the data, Swedish headers such as Datum, Belopp and Saldo, decimal commas, and numbers or dates stored as text. Each column is typed by what its cells hold.

When the sheet is ambiguous

Sometimes the file cannot say — two unnamed columns of amounts, for instance. Then Fluidly leaves that role open rather than guess, because a wrong amount is a number nobody has reason to doubt.

Open the card with the pencil and a Columns panel appears beside it. Each role lists the file's columns, typed and with a few sample cells, the likeliest first. Choose one, or Not set to let the file decide. The choice is kept: re-importing next month's file reads it the same way, and if a chosen column is missing from the new file, Fluidly falls back to reading the sheet.

Example

Excel (a bank statement export) → Timeline: the history of an account that has no open banking connection, on the same axis as the ones that do.