Sometimes it is necessary to create a new column which is a combination of one or two existing columns plus some constants. For example if the CSV data covers more than one day it might be a good idea to create a date and time stamp which consists of a part of the date and the time for charting purposes. The “Create Column” on the left side of the Main worksheet allows to add new columns or to overwrite existing columns:
In
order to create a new column you can fill out up to 7 pieces of information:
We want to create a new column which consists of a portion of the date and the time. We will use the CSV data sheet from SMF 99 subtype 2 data as an example.
As
first column we enter B and as
second column C because the date is
in the second and the time in the third column of this data sheet. In order to
extract the day and month from the date we enter TT.MM in the first column type field. Please notice that this
assumes that the date is formatted as a German date in the form of TT.MM.JJJJ.
For a standard US date in the form of MM/DD/YY we would have to enter MM/DD.
What you have to use depends on the localization setting of your windows
system. For the time we enter HH:MM
and basically the same applies as for the date.
As additional constants we only want to add a dash between the date and time and enter ’- for the “Mid” definition. It is advised to always use a hyphen in front of numbers or operators if they should be interpreted as a string value. The hyphen will not appear in the result.
As a result column we define the first column because this
only contains an interval number for which we have no use. The new column name
should be “Date-Time”. The we press and the new column is added.
Attention: After
adding the new column it does not automatically appear on the left hand side of
the Main worksheet. We have to press the button and the columns on
the left side are updated as well.