A Professional and Enterprise Plan Feature

Jibility supports the ability to import and add new initiatives from an Excel spreadsheet.

Note; currently, this import feature does not support updating your initiatives. It supports adding new initiatives only.

The use cases for this feature are

1) You have an existing list of initiatives that you want to export from another tool and import these into Jibility;

2) You wish to make bulk changes to your list of initiatives and it is easier to export them to Excel, delete all current initiatives, apply changes to your list in Excel and re-import.

How to import initiatives from Excel?

To import initiatives from Excel, select the Initiative step and click on the import initiative button illustrated below.

TIPS: You can export the Initiative Summary List published document to Excel. The Initiative Name and Description columns in this spreadsheet are the columns imported by this feature.

If an error occurs during import, a pop-up window (as illustrated below) will display the error messages. You can retain a copy of all the error messages by manually selecting the messages in the text box and enter CTRL-C or click the "Copy & Close" button to automatically copy the messages to the clipboard. You can then paste the messages in a notepad or spreadsheet to analyze and address each error.

Import Initiative Layout

When importing initiatives, the layout of the newly imported initiatives are as follows

1) All imported initiatives are laid out from left to right and top to bottom, starting from the last row of the existing initiative grid. The initiatives are imported in the order as they appear in the spreadsheet.

2) If the existing initiative grid is empty or has less than five initiative columns, then the imported initiatives will be added to the initiative grid row by row to a span of five columns.

In the following example, the existing initiatives map has one initiative. The imported initiatives will start from the second row and fill five columns.

3) If the existing initiative grid has five or more initiative columns, then the imported initiatives will be added to the initiative grid row by row to a span matching the existing number of columns.

In the following example, the existing initiative gird has seven columns. The imported initiative will start from the second row and span seven columns.

TIPS: you can add some temporary initiatives to indicate how many columns to span when importing. Once the import is completed, just delete the temporary initiatives.

Import File Format

The import initiative feature is designed to import from an Excel spreadsheet similar to the Excel file created by the export function in the Initiative Summary List published document feature.

Here is an example of the Excel file format for the Insure North sample roadmap.

The following is a description of the expected Excel file format:

1) The import Excel file must have a header on line six.

2) The import Excel file must have at least two header columns: Initiative Name and Initiative Description.

3) The import Excel file may have a similar structure to the Jibility Initiative Summary List export file. Here is how the import initiative feature will treat each column from the Initiative Summary List export document.

Header Column Name	Required?	Imported	Description
Value Rating	No	No	Not Imported
Risk/Effort Rating	No	No	Not imported
Value Name	No	No	Not imported
Theme	No	No	Not imported
Stage	No	No	Not imported
Initiative Name	Yes	Yes	The initiative name. This name must be unique. Maximum 80 characters.
Initiative Description	No	Yes	The initiative description. Maximum 1000 characters.
Owner Name	No	Yes	The name of the initiative owner. Maximum 50 characters.

Import Initiative Error Messages

When importing initiatives, you may encounter error messages. Error messages may appear in the a popup window or as a snack bar.

Popup Window Error Messages

The following is a description of each message.

Error Message	Cause
The description must be at most 1000 characters long.	Description is too long
The name must be at most 80 characters long.	Initiative name is too long
The name must be at least 1 character long.	Initiative name was not given
The owner name must be at most 50 characters long.	Initiative owner name too long.
The name is already used by an existing initiative.	Duplicate initiative names are not allowed. There is already an initiative of that name.
The name exists more than once in the imported initiative	Duplicate initiative names are not allowed. There are duplicate initiatives in the import file.

Snack Bar Error Messages

Snack Bar Error messages appear as a line at the bottom of the page as illustrated below.

The following is a description of the error messages

Error Message	Cause
Could not import your initiatives. Ensure your excel document is valid and try again.	The file cannot be read, for example it may be corrupted or permission issues.
The document did not contain any initiatives. Please add some and try again.	A header row exists, but the subsequent rows are empty.
Could not import your initiatives. No entries found in the header row (6)	Row number 6 is empty where there should be initiative headings (Initiative Name and Initiative Description required)
Could not import your initiative. The required header "initiative name" was not found in the header row (6).	Header row is not empty but is missing 'name' heading
Could not import your initiative. The required headers "initiative name" was not found in the header row (6).	Header row is not empty but is missing 'initiative name' headings