Dotwave Upload CSV or Excel files
Uploading a file is the fastest way to get data into Dotwave. Drag a spreadsheet onto the workspace and, within seconds, you have a typed dataset ready for cleaning, joining, and charting. This article covers the formats Dotwave accepts, the size ceiling, and the handful of edge cases — Excel workbooks, text encoding, merged cells — that trip up analysts most often.
Supported formats and limits
Dotwave reads four file types directly from the Add data source flow:
.csv— comma-separated values, the most portable option..tsv— tab-separated values, useful when your data contains commas..xlsx— modern Excel workbooks..xls— legacy Excel workbooks (Excel 97–2003).
The maximum upload size is 100MB per file. If your export is larger, filter or aggregate it at the source before uploading, or split it into multiple files and combine them on the Data sources page using a union. Column headers should live in the first row; Dotwave infers each column's type (text, number, date, boolean) from the values it sees.
Save CSV exports with UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 preserves accented characters, currency symbols, and non-Latin scripts. Files saved in legacy code pages (such as Windows-1252) can render names and symbols as garbled characters, and once imported those errors are tedious to unwind.
How to upload a file
From the Data sources page, click Add data source and choose Upload file.
Drop the file onto the upload area, or click to open your system file picker. Dotwave validates the format and size as soon as the file lands.
Dotwave shows a preview with inferred types. Confirm that dates, numbers, and text landed in the right buckets before you continue.
Click Import to create the dataset. It is now available for cleaning and for building dashboards.
How Excel workbooks are handled
Excel files often contain several tabs, but Dotwave imports only the first sheet of a workbook. Any additional tabs are ignored during import. If the data you need lives on a later tab, move or copy it to the first sheet before uploading, or save that single tab as its own file. This keeps imports predictable and avoids silently pulling in the wrong table.
Excel files with merged cells will be imported but merged cells may not parse correctly. Unmerge before uploading for best results.
Re-uploading when the file changes
Uploaded files are a point-in-time snapshot — Dotwave does not watch your local disk for changes. When the underlying spreadsheet is updated, open the dataset and use Re-upload to replace its contents with the new file. As long as the column names match, any cleaning recipes and downstream charts continue to work against the refreshed data. If you need data that stays in sync automatically, consider a live connection such as Google Sheets, a REST API, or a database via the agent instead of a static upload.
Re-uploading replaces every row in the dataset. If you only want to add new rows to existing data, a Webhook data source in Append mode is a better fit than repeatedly re-uploading a growing file.