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Cradle includes a plug-in for Excel that can be used to capture data from a spreadsheet directly into a Cradle database. The plug-in can capture from spreadsheets into:
The plug-in is the file cradle.xla and is automatically installed by the Cradle installation, although you may need to enable the plug-in manually by selecting Tools → Add-Ins… (in Excel 2003) and enabling the Cradle Capture Plug-in:
The plug-in is a VBA macro, and so may not be allowed by your organisation.
When the plug-in is active, you will see a new button in the Excel button bar:
If this does not appear, select View → Toolbars (for Excel 2003) and select the Cradle toolbar.
The Excel plug-in does not have all of the facilities of the Cradle CSV import and export mechanisms, but it has the advantages:
To capture data from Excel in Cradle, open Excel on a spreadsheet or CSV file whose data is to be captured:
You must ensure that you have columns for all of the mandatory attributes for the type of information that you wish to capture:
Select the button to start the Cradle plug-in and login to your Cradle project, in this case, an empty project called PLAY:
Login is confirmed by the message Project Params successfully acquired at the bottom of the dialog. Select Capture Settings:
The next step is to select the rows and columns from which you want to capture data. If you have a row of headings, then select this row as well as it will then be easier to specify the mapping of columns to item attributes:
Click Acquire Selection in the plug-in and the plug-in will examine the range that you have selected and if valid, it will allow you to specify the item type into which we want to load information, in this case we will load data from the spreadsheet into the predefined Requirements items:
You can also capture into user-defined items (system notes) and into specifications for models.
You can control how the captured data is to be loaded into the database:
These overwrite options have been discussed in a previous section.
Select the Table Details tab to specify the mapping between the selected columns and the attributes of the requirements in the database:
The columns in the first selected row are shown in the left hand list, with their assignment to requirement attributes. Initially there are no assignments. If the spreadsheet did not have a row of headings, or it did but we did not select it, then the contents of the first row of data that would be shown in the left hand list and you would select the Include 1st Row checkbox to capture data from this first row as well as all other selected rows.
The right hand list shows all of the attributes of the requirement items from the schema in the current project.
Select the Auto Assign button and the plug-in will attempt to create mappings between the columns and the attributes, based on the names of the spreadsheet’s columns:
To add the remaining assignments, select a column in the left hand list and an attribute in the right hand list and select ← Assign to make the assignment. If you want to remove an assignment, select the column in the left hand list and select Remove →.
After making all of the assignments, you will have a mapping between the columns in the spreadsheet and the attributes of the items that you want to create in the database:
If you want to ignore any of the columns that you selected in the spreadsheet, do not define an assignment for it and select Ignore Unset which will mark all columns without an assignment as Unset and the plug-in will ignore them when it processes the spreadsheet.
Ensure that there is data in the first column for which you have defined an assignment because the plug-in will stop processing as soon as it finds a row whose first assigned column is empty.
If the spreadsheet does not have columns for all of the category codes in your items (such as ITEM STATUS in this example), and you want to define values for these category codes then select the Project Information tab and define these default values from the drop-down lists provided:
Select Capture to capture the data from the spreadsheet into Cradle. When this completes, the message Capture has been successful will be shown in the plug-in’s status bar:
The data can be viewed in Cradle in the usual way, in this example by running a query to show the requirements:
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