“How can I get my data into data.world?”
We hear that question often enough. It’s tough to upload and continuously update the assets powering your data work. When your data lives in different places and is updated at different rates, it gets even more complicated.
We‘ve been working hard to give you options to import your data easily, no matter where the source is. Right now, you can import data in a few ways:
- Connect to your current toolchain with one of our ready-to-go integrations
- Drag and drop any file right into your datasets
- Add data from any URL
- Connect your data projects to public and private datasets already available on data.world
We’ve extended these even further, rolling out a number of improvements and new features that make it easier to get your data onto data.world.
Add more data and files via integrations
A new guided experience gives you a more extensive palette of one-click options and allows you to import your data and your files via a number of integrations.
You can still upload individual files directly or add them from URLs. Now, you can also connect to Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, and Excel.
You’ll see this new view when you add data and files to any of your datasets or data projects. And make sure to come back often and check for new options: we‘ve got quite a few planned in the near future.
Automatically refresh files added via URL
data.world members have always loved the convenience of adding files from URL. When the official source of that data is outside of data.world, that makes it much easier to refresh (a.k.a. sync) the data when it is updated, eliminating a lot of the time typically spent on intensely manual work.
Until recently, data.world required members to trigger the refresh process manually via our website or our API — or occasionally with the assistance and convenience IFTTT.
Now, you can define sync options for your data projects and datasets and data.world will automatically refresh the data either hourly, daily or weekly. You can feel good about always having fresh data, spending less time collecting it together and more time exploring insights.
Find this in the Settings section of your datasets and data projects.
Fetch data from virtually any site or web API
If you have realized how adding files from a URL can be a powerful way to optimize your data workflow, you have certainly wished you could hook into a few more sources that need just a bit more to sync. Us, too. Good news: you can now specify additional parameters, including:
- Authentication (which we safely store)
- Custom headers
- HTTP request method, including POST payloads
With these options, you are not only adding files from URLs, you are specifying the HTTP request you want data.world to make on your behalf to retrieve your data. That allows us to retrieve your data even when it is password protected or needs to be accessed via a web API.
When adding new files from URL or editing an existing connection on data.world, find these new options by expanding the “Advanced options” section.
We are excited to think about the possibilities these features unleash and what cool things you’ll do with them!
Wonder what some interesting options might be? Try these:
- Get files from BitBucket or GitLab repos
- Pull data from import.io
- Import Ona.io form answers
- Export MixPanel data using JQL. (Read how to do it first.)
Where is your data? Tell us how we can help you get it onto data.world.
