Getting the most out of Caliber RM - Excel

In a prior post I wrote about the different ways you can get output from Caliber RM. Since then we have started using a few additional mechanisms that may not be obvious to new users.

For the longest time we couldnt figure out the cleanest way to get our software requirements from Caliber RM into an Excel Spreadsheet. Excel is nice because the filtering, formatting etc is very robust. The downside of Excel is that keeping software requirements meta data is hard and history is just about impossible.

The right way took us a while to find so I'm very excited to share it. It isn't obvious at all and is more like an Easter Egg than a feature. I'll start with the basic flow to just get it done and then go into a few details of how you can fine tune it.

a) Open up the requirements grid

b) Set a filter

c) Generate your list of requirements

d) Select File->Print (really!)

e) Select Print Preview

d) System will display your requirements grid in a browser window

e) In Internet Explorer you can right click and export to Microsoft Excel.

This process is extremely fast and is great for exporting to Excel

To fine tune this you will want to use an rgv (requirements grid view) file so that you dont have to keep hiding and reordering the columns. The rgv file describes which columns you want, in what order and with what width.

To generate an RGV file:

a) Organize the columns the way you want

b) Select File->Save, this will save the RGV file.

c) Unfortunately there is an error in the way Caliber RM outputs RGV files. The default miscalculates the correct number of columns so you get extra columns, so you will have to hand edit it to only get the columns you want and set the column count to be the correct # of columns. I just use notepad to edit the rgv file.

There is a feature on the requirements grid that is file->print->export requirements. You might think that this would be the feature that you want, but oddly enough it does something completely unexpected. You can try it to see...