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[jordanParticipant]

I am working on a project where I import data sets with lots of columns 500+, do some data manipulation then export very few of the columns (~50). When importing I have to have all the columns shown to ensure that the are inserted into the template properly, but for exporting I need to have extra columns hidden so they are not included in the export. This leads me to checking and unchecking include and show checkboxes hundreds of times. If I could highlight the columns and right click for a show or hide toggle, that would be really great. Thanks!

[dgteamModerator]

Hi Jordan!

That is a lot of columns and sounds tedious.  We definitely want to help make this easier! First, you may already know these tips below, but here are some existing techniques that might help.

From the Column List: What I typically do is highlight multiple columns in the column list, click the data group icon or select Edit > Group, and then uncheck Include on the group to hide columns in bulk. If the columns are sequential in the column list this can be very fast, as you can click the white space to the right of the list and drag to highlight multiple columns.

From the Data Table: Another thought is that you can select just the columns in the data table you want to export.  Again if the columns are sequential this can be very fast as you only have to click the first column header and last column header while holding the shift key.  Then when you select File > Export Data, it will only export the selected columns.

Another thought is that is might make sense to create an Import Special method to only import the data you need.  Do you use all 500 columns? Does the file always have the same format?

If the data is the always in the same format this is possible.  If the format varies that could be a problem.  ImportSpecial is also a very fast method of importing large datasets, so that is another advantage of using this approach.

Let us know if anything here sounds promising, and we can go from there.

 

[jordanParticipant]

Apologies, I must have missed this reply. I am aware of these methods, but are very reliant on the sequencing. The problem is that I am taking data from 50 sensors and each sensor supplies 10 columns of various data and meta data. It is important to get all the data because the meta data can affect the processing that I am doing in data graph. What I need to share with colleagues is only the output. I think another way of doing it is just mapping the columns I want to a export to another group, so I can hide or show those columns when I export and show the originals on the import. I think that will work.

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