One thing to look out for when building a CSV file for resource loading is the presence of trailing spaces. Nasty little things when it comes to loading your ancillary file data into Deltek Cobra. A trailing space is the invisible killer of resource calculation files; as I’ve discovered recently. I’m still working on the largest resource file build of my career and this one nearly killed the job. Upon integrating the schedule, warnings abound reporting rates that do not exist prior to a certain date. Yet when you check the rate file, they’re most definitely there.
[Warning]No rate found for Program Manager, rate set INDIRECT 0.53 on or before 06/30/2012
What you need to watch out for is how Microsoft Excel (assuming that’s what you’re using) changes certain values when you perform the ‘Save As…’ operation to create the CSV file. For example, a string value that ends with a zero gets the zero overwritten with a trailing space, rather than Excel faithfully writing the zero. The one that bit me this time was a rate set named “INDIRECT 0.530”. When I saved the CSV file, it got written as “INDIRECT 0.53 “. When you load this into Cobra you get warnings claiming the rate set wasn’t found. Ya think?
Tip – open your CSV file in Notepad and use find replace to mark your spaces by replacing them with underscores. Then open it in Excel and the problem pops right out at you. Note that the spaces in the Source columns don’t seem to trouble Cobra, just those in the Rate Set column.