Excel to Adobe Insight Worksheet Tool

Posted by Michael Halbrook on Feb 14, 2011
1 vote

 

One of the very powerful and commonly-used visualizations in Adobe Insight is the Worksheet visualization. It allows an analyst to create ad hoc metrics and filters. Like a standard spreadsheet, every cell can contain a static value or a formula - including references to other cells. In addition, though, Insight Worksheet cells can contain formulas that define metrics.
 
It's a common request to be able to easily bring in external data - from an Excel worksheet for instance - quickly and easily without retyping.
 
Sometimes, it's as simple as bringing in a dozen cells of benchmark data to write comparative metrics against.
 
Sometimes, it's more like 12 rows times 12 columns of benchmark data.
 
Either way, it's labor-intensive to re-type and introduces the risk of human error. Plus, it's a pain if these values change over time and need to be imported frequently (but not frequently or significantly enough to warrant automating them in as a log source into your dataset.)
 
This "Excel to Insight" conversion tool will take data that you input into Excel (static values, formulas, and even metric formulas that you'd like to write in Excel and bring across to Insight) and convert it into an Insight worksheet in a .vw file that can be opened in Insight - effectively taking your Excel data to an Insight worksheet for you.
 
First, unzip the provided zip file so the root install folder "Insight_Excel-2-Insight" sits on the root C:\ drive (there are file references/links that need to referenced in the same location).
 
Then, open the Excel spreadsheet "Excel-to-Insight.xlsm". Follow the instructions on the first worksheet to ensure you've enabled macros in a way that this tool can do its job.
 
Finally, plug the data you want into the allowable cells (inside the red border area) in the second worksheet. Input the desired filename for your .vw and click the button at the top, and - presto! - you have a .vw file.
 
Once you have the .vw file, you can open it via the "Open" command in an Insight workspace, and/or copy into your user Work folder in Insight and open from within the Insight client. Here's mine:
 
The tool has instructions built in. And, yes, you can pre-write formulas in Excel as well - just use a leading single quote (') at the start of the formula.

Attachments: to download.

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