Working With Excel

An Excel file is called a workbook. Each workbook contains one or more worksheets. Each worksheet is represented by a tab along the bottom edge of the Excel spreadsheet window. To switch to another worksheet, click on its tab.

As with any spreadsheet, each worksheet represents a tabular grid — rows are numbered and columns are identified by letter. The upper left cell is referred to as A1.

RiskVision uses worksheets to separate the data to import from information about the data. A special worksheet, called a ‘Map’ worksheet, describes the data to import. The actual data is on a different worksheet that can be called anything you want. A third sheet, Name Space, is a guide to available attributes.

The Map worksheet has a specific format. On the first few rows, the Map describes the name of the data sheet, an optional Tag, and start and end row numbers for the data to be imported. The remainder of the Map worksheet lists attributes of the data being imported. For example, attributes of a User include firstName, lastName, and e-mail Address. For each attribute named in column A, a letter in column B identifies the column on the data worksheet that corresponds to the attribute. Column C provides an optional default value (to be used if the data for this attribute is missing), and column D is reserved for notes.

Some attributes are required, such as an entity’s name, type, and primary owner (the user importing the data). Optional attributes for entities, such as additional owners, location, classification, and organizational information, are useful for reporting and workflow-based assessments.

EXAMPLE
Your data table is on a worksheet called ‘User’ and looks like this:

In this case, your Map would look like this:

Notice that the data worksheet can include columns that are not imported (because the column is not specified in the Map). Conversely, not all attributes listed in the Map must be provided by the data worksheet.

Boolean values must be either "true" or "false." Other values, such as "Yes" "No", "1", or "0" will evaluate to false.