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Database/Excel Numeric Summary Extract

The Save Extract for Database option is located in the File menu of the Numeric Summary.

In this option, the Numeric Summary information is written to a format suitable for database and Excel import. All of the numeric summary information specified will be written on a single line for each fit in the Review. The options are identical to those in the Numeric Summary.

The file will contain a header with unique variables that can be used for fields in a database or column identifiers in Excel. A CSV (comma separated value) format is used.

Since a PFChrom fit can contain up to 50 peaks, and each model can contain up to 10 parameters, the length of this single line can become excessively long if every possible field is written to guarantee the alignment of the columns in Excel across different extracts. If you wish to fit chromatographic models with up to 8 parameters, and your database consists of analyses never containing more than 10 fitted peaks, you should set the bounds to 10 peaks and 8 parameters to minimize the length of information written. These different extracts can then be combined at any time since they will have the same columnar structure.

The advantage of this option is that fitted results are available on a per-row or per-record basis:

This is useful for swift comparisons or modeling of the different peak parameters and properties across different data sets.

The export can be optionally appended to an existing CSV extract making it possible to create database extracts containing a large number of data sets. Each appended extract is written with a new header. If the headers of the various appended sets do not match up due to differences in the maximum peaks and maximum parameters settings, comparisons in Excel will be difficult. This is why you should carefully set the maximum count of peaks and parameters that you would expect to see in the fits represented in the extracts, accepting that some number of empty fields or cells will be written into each row or record.

Note that the fit information is always contained in the saved PFD files and these extracts can be generated simply by loading the PFD file and recalling the saved fit(s). Note that a 20 data set PFD file, with 12 fits, would require 12 instances of this extract procedure, one original extract, and 11 appended, one for each fit you wish to insert into the database of spreadsheet. For this example, imported into Excel, there would be 240 fits in the file, 12 for each of the 20 data sets.