Can I use an Excel (xls) file as input for DMAP-AI?
Answer: yes. For point-based analysis you can provide your data in an Excel or text file — typically two columns, Date and precipitation — and the tool reads it directly. The free online DMAP-AI handles point-based SPI drought analysis, while the desktop DMAP V2.1 reads Excel/CSV/text files (with automatic column and date detection) as well as NetCDF grids for 19 drought indices.
One of the best characteristics of DMAP-AI is the format of input files. Since the user have different format files as the input file, so we consider this problem. It means, the user can upload his/her file in xls and xlsx, without any concern for the order of variables in the columns.
If we assign only one main format of data for the input file, this can be tedious for the user. When a user intends to get a specific data file for a region, it may be in every format of file, since different centers are providing data, so the formats would not be similar. In other similar software tools, the user should arrange the data in a specific format, if the period is so long then this process is prone to error and time-consuming. Hence, we have tried to develop the "MDM" (DMAP-AI) tool by solving this problem. By solving the issue, the user can easily assign the data, step by step by calling them without any specific format or specific order. Since most of the time the station data are in Excel or CSV file, therefore Agrimetsoft put the excel format file for input data in the "MDM" (DMAP-AI) tool.