Getting ready

Preparation for this task is very simple. We only need a set of data saved in an Excel workbook. Any worksheet is suitable, but be aware that the Open Worksheet… command will open every worksheet in an Excel workbook at the same time. The formatting options that we will use here are applied across the entire workbook and cannot have separate format options for every worksheet. Minitab worksheets have a maximum limit of 4000 columns and a practical limit of 10 million rows.

We follow an example here using the Pulse workbook.xlx worksheet.

How to do it…

The following instructions detail the steps for importing data from Excel by using the open worksheet command:

How it works…

The Preview screen will display the first 100 rows in the dataset. This can be a useful tool in seeing how the file is going to be opened and then deciding what needs to be changed in options.

Excel files can come in many different formats, and while options cannot correct everything, it is an important first step.

If a dataset contains summarized data rows such as means or standard deviations at the end of the worksheet, it is best to exclude them. This can be performed by limiting the number of rows that Minitab will open.

Another option that is useful is to ignore blank data rows. Any row that is completely empty will be left out as it is unnecessary to include them in a Minitab worksheet.

There's more…

Text files, CSV files, XML files, and more can be opened using the Open Worksheet option. While opening text files, column separators can be identified by using the field definition.

See also