Brinkhaus openXEdge
How-to v2

You want to work through a stretch of measurements in Excel — to check a run-up, or to hand a recording to someone else. Every Grafana panel hands out its data as CSV; the work is in the Excel import afterwards.

1. Pick the time range first

Set the time range top-right before you export. What you get is exactly what the panel currently shows.

Keep it short. The IDEA-4S signals add up to tens of thousands of values per hour — the database delivers that in a fraction of a second, but rendering the table in the browser costs the edge noticeable time. For a whole day, export several hours one after another.

2. Download the CSV

  1. Click the three dots at the top right of the panel.
  2. Choose Inspect → Data.
  3. Under Data options, turn on Download for Excel.
  4. Click Download CSV.

That switch is what makes the file open cleanly: Grafana then writes a separator hint into the first line, which Excel reads when opening the file.

3. Import into Excel

Open Excel with an empty worksheet and pull the file in via Data → From Text/CSV — not by double-clicking the file.

In the Transform Data window, watch two things:

  • Delimiter must be comma.
  • The Changed Type step on the right under Applied Steps guesses column types from the locale. Grafana writes numbers with a decimal point; an Excel set to a decimal comma therefore guesses wrong and turns 12.5 into a date or into 125. Delete that step with the cross; every column then arrives as text and you set the types yourself.

4. The time axis

Which columns you get depends on the panel you exported. The time-series panels of the delivered dashboard give you a time column with date and time plus one column per curve (e.g. value_temperature_bearing_1). Those you can use directly: type the column as date/time and you are done.

Some hand-built table panels hand out the time as a number instead — seconds since 1 Jan 1970. Turn it into a date axis in a new column (time column in B here):

=B2/86400 + DATE(1970,1,1)

Or into a relative axis in seconds from the start of the recording — usually the better choice for a run-up:

=B2-$B$2

5. The chart

Use a scatter (XY) chart with lines, not a line chart: a line chart treats the timestamps as evenly spaced labels and distorts every gap in the recording. Then right-click the X axis → Format Axis → Number, clear Linked to source, and enter the format you want.

Why some cells stay empty

When a panel folds several signals into one table, gaps show up. The signals do not arrive at the same rate — the sensor reports on change, not on a fixed cycle. Measured on an edge over two hours (gap between consecutive values, median): vibration velocity 0.1 s, bearing and coolant temperatures 0.2 s, rotational speed 30 s with the spindle idle. In the rows in between, the slower column stays empty. That is not a gap in the recording. For a continuous curve, filter in Excel on the rows where the column is populated.