During my time working as a scientist in R&D, there were times I wanted to augment my analyses with data that was not always in a straightforward file type that could be imported efficiently into JMP. For example, think of multiple PDF pages with chemical composition information – each with slightly different formatting. Or think about multiple web pages with data for different regions – with a different URL for each page. Another example would be including experimental pictures in a data table – and matching each of the hundreds of pictures with the corresponding file names.

Although JMP supports bringing in data from PDF formats and websites, as well as allowing you to bring in pictures into a data table, it is not always obvious how to do this efficiently when you have lots of pages or images to import. If you are not a proficient scripter (or don't know someone who is) you may end up doing each import manually…or simply forgoing the information and moving on.

The good news is that even without being able to write a script from scratch, you can use basic JSL decoding skills to bring in data from these kinds of sources efficiently. In this paper, we show a few examples of how we used JMP’s point-and-click tools, along with basic JSL deciphering skills, to automate the import of images, data from PDFs and web pages with scale.