Pulling data: key concepts
In this first lesson, we’ll dive into one of the essential first steps of Parabola: importing your data.
Building challenge
To get started, we’ll import CSV data into our Flow by following these steps:
- If you haven’t already, click this link to create a new Flow
- Download this sample sales dataset
- Add a card (right click) to the canvas titled “Pull sales data”
- Add a Pull from CSV file step to the “Pull sales data” card to load the sales data into Parabola
Check your work ▼
Importing Data into Parabola
In this lesson, we’ll cover one of the most crucial first steps in Parabola: pulling in your data.
If we navigate to the Integrations tab, you’ll see a variety of data sources that Parabola can pull from, including:
- CSV files
- Google Sheets
- Sales platforms like Shopify
- Databases, APIs, and more
As you're getting started, we recommend beginning with a simple source like a CSV file, Excel file, or Google Sheets. These are the fastest and easiest ways to get data into Parabola, allowing you to start transforming it right away. You can always explore other integrations later.
Loading Data from a CSV
Let’s walk through pulling in data from a CSV file:
- Search for "CSV" in the Integrations tab.
- Drag the "Pull from CSV" step onto the canvas or drop it into a card to organize your workflow.
- Double-click to open the step, and you’ll see an option to drop in a file.
- Upload a CSV file—in this case, we’ll use an inventory dataset.
Once uploaded, Parabola quickly imports the data. Here, we’re working with 40 rows and 8 columns, and we’re now ready to start transforming it.
No CSV? No Problem.
If you don’t have a CSV file handy, no worries! Scroll down on this page in Parabola University, where you’ll find a sample dataset available for download. We’ll use this dataset throughout the course in the sample data challenge.
Now that we’ve successfully pulled in data from a CSV, we’ll quickly review a few other ways to import data before diving into transformations. Let’s get started!