Table Name

The name of the new table.

The name cannot be blank and must be different from all other tables in the project.

Link/Copy

Whether to copy the data in to the project, or leave it in the file.

There are two options available to import data. One is to take a copy of the data from the file into the project. Afterwards, the source file is forgotten: it can be deleted, moved or edited with no effect on the project. This is the best option if you want to access the project from multiple machines. The alternative is to link the file. The source file must be kept afterwards, and any changes will be automatically detected by the project. This is the best option for very large datasets, or if you know the file will have its data changed in future.

Encoding

The scheme used to encode characters in the file. UTF-8 is the most likely choice.

There are lots of different characters in the world: Latin characters (as used in the English alphabet), Arabic, Chinese and many more besides. An encoding scheme is the way in which these characters are numbered and stored in a file. Unfortunately, historically every sub-region had its own encoding, and if you get the encoding mismatched, you will get weird characters. Recently, UTF-8 has become something of a common standard, but many other encoding schemes are still in use. Try UTF-8 first, but try then others if that doesn't work.

Header Rows

How many rows to skip at the beginning of the file.

There are often header rows at the beginning of the file which do not contain useful data. This number is how many rows to skip. The last row is taken to be the names of the columns.

Quote Character

The character used to surround columns.

Text files use a particular character, such as a comma, to separate the columns. But some pieces of text may actually contain a comma. So quotes are sometimes used to surround text values in columns.

Column Count

The number of columns to use in the file.

If every row has the same number of columns then this is fixed. If there is a varying number of columns then you must specify the current number.

Column Separator

The character used to separate columns in the file.

The columns in each row need to be separated by a particular character, such as a comma or semi-colon.

Remove leading/trailing spaces

Removes spaces at the beginning and end of each cell on import

The import can either keep the values exactly as they appear in the HTML including all spaces (in which case leave this box empty) or it can remove these extra spaces, which is usually preferred (in which case tick the box).

Remove wikipedia footnotes

Removes wikipedia foonotes from the table

Wikipedia tables often have lots of footnotes. This option, available when importing wikipedia URLs, removes the footnotes before importing the table.