Openbox lets you bring in pieces of your existing Excel models by copying and pasting (Make a new component from an existing Excel model). But what if you want to bring in an entire sheet or even an entire model?

First, open the Excel model. Select the sheet or sheets you want to bring into Openbox. Then click “Openbox” and “Import selected sheet(s)”. 

Openbox needs full access to the model for this import, and so it has to be closed in Excel. It will be re-opened later.

The process will proceed much like the process for copying and pasting,. You will be asked:

• What each column represents
• Whether you want to revalidate the model after bringing in the sheet from Excel. You may wish to do this for small sheets although we recommend reviewing the imported sheet first.
• Whether you want to merge the imported items with anything of the same name already in the model.

Once the sheet has been imported, it will have the same name as the sheet in Excel. So if you import “Construction”, you will see a new sheet called “Construction” in your Openbox model.

IMPORTANT: This only allows you to import calculation or input sheets. To import report sheets, follow the instructions here.