Introduction

Loading new Baseline Storage Sheets (BSS) into  the database requires the import to recognize the data in the various worksheets and allocate the correct standard metadata. Data that cannot be recognized automatically because it uses different terminology or different cell locations to the norm must be reconciled manually, requiring an additional level of effort.

Below are recommendations for data entry in a BSS that ensure that it will be easy to load into the HEA Baseline Database.

Guidelines

File Formats

All new BSS should be maintained using current versions of Excel and saved in the .xlsx file format. The .xls format is obsolete and is not supported by many modern tools.

Community Names

The Community Full Name is constructed from the admin unit name (typically labeled District) and the community name (typically labeled Village) that are in rows 4 and 5 of the WB, Data, Data2 and Data3 worksheets in a BSS. The database uses these names to ensure that the data from the different worksheets can be linked to the correct Community entry in the database. Consequently, the spelling of those names in all places where they appear is critical to successfully recognizing the data.

Ideally, either cell validation or conditional formatting should be used to ensure that the names are accurate, for example by comparing them to the Form 3 interview results in ‘WB’!C4:L5.

Livelihood Strategies (Data, Data2, Data3)

Metadata should only be in Column A

Don’t put metadata (data that describes the livelihood strategy in the per-community columns (i.e. column B onwards). The reported income or kcals for each community are used to produce a reconciled value for the Livelihood Zone, and so the numbers for each community must be referring to the same Livelihood Strategy. For example, if the strategy refers to a particular type of food, then it should be in the label in Column A, and not in that row in Column.  

For example, the following data:

Should properly be entered as:

Notice that “termites” has been moved from the community cells (B9 and D9) to the label in A10.

Column A should explicitly state the expected data values for the row

If data is expected in the row, then the label in column A should explicitly state what data is expected.

For example, if the data is the number of local units purchased, then the label might be bambara nuts: no. local meas., whereas if the data is the amount produced then the label could be bambara nuts: kg produced.

This avoids the ambiguity inherent in labels such as Other Crop Type: bambara nuts, where it is unclear whether the values represent the amount in kg, or the number of local measures, or just a label where no additional data is expected.

Data should not be stored in label rows

As well as avoiding using cells in the main body of the worksheet for capturing metadata, it is also important to not put data values, including 0, in cells on rows where the value in Column A is a heading or other label. This sometimes happens when the previous Livelihood Activity contained a 0 entry for many rows and they have been copied down one row too far, into the heading for the next section of the BSS.

The BSS ingestion will refuse to load a BSS that contains data in unexpected locations, because we need to ensure that no important data is lost.