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Certain reports available through ClinSpark are provided in CSV (Comma Separated Value) format. CSV is a widely used and flexible format that relies on a delimiter between reported values. CSV is often preferred over XLS (Microsoft Excel) due to inherent limitations with how data can be reported into Excel worksheets. This article will explain these limitations and provide suggestions on how to work with CSV files provided by ClinSpark.
Row and File Size Limits
Excel has a limit to the number of rows and columns that can be used per worksheet, which is exceeded quickly with certain study/device data sets. CSV files however can hold many more rows of data than XLS, and do not have these issues. Additionally there are file size limits with Excel workbooks which are difficult to design and implement certain reports around. Formatting requirements can also cause challenges with mixing various types of data. Customers can learn more about Excel file limits from this Microsoft support article.
Tips for using Excel and CSV files
The default mechanism of opening CSV files in Excel through local file folders or a browser directly may be problematic due to some assumed default behavior when handling imported data. One example is how the formatting of dates & times are changed if there are differences in the format in CSV, and the interpreted datetime in Excel. Another common issue we see are with handling of numeric values in CSV that contain a leading sequence of numbers such as zero (0); where upon opening the file in Excel the zeros appear to be stripped or removed. Excel may not always properly handle the import of the CSV contents for expected review based on these behaviors.
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Example Workflow
The following is an example on how to import a transfer data set using the Clinical Data Text (delimited) report type, which outputs series of CSV files. This is a unique example, because unlike the CSV file format suggests where the data is separated by comma, the delimiter is a pipe (vertical bar, |).
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