Data can be entered within the program itself or easily imported from Excel (.XLS or .XLSX formats) or from Canoco 4.x data files. Labels no longer need to be shortened to 8 characters, but these brief forms are still available for display in the ordination diagrams and can even be automatically generated from the long ones. Standard coding of factors (categorical predictors) is now used, dummy (0/1) variables are generated internally. The editor allows transformation from dummy variables to factors and, if needed, the reverse.
The above snapshot shows a page from the Excel Import wizard, where the range of input data and the multiplicity of row and column labels is specified. In the background, you can see the data notebook of the existing Canoco project. Data notebooks can be not only viewed, but also edited in a way similar to Excel spreadsheets.