When importing site data from Excel, you will need to tell the Excel Site Data Importer where to find the values of the various site, sector and radio parameters in the spreadsheet. You do this by specifying bindings for each property you wish to import.

You can specify bindings for the settable parameters of Sites, Sectors, Radios, and Connections. The bindings for sites are displayed below:

A binding is simply a reference to a rectangular region of cells in an Excel worksheet. Bindings can take the following forms:

• [worksheet]! column row This tells the importer to start looking for data in the specified worksheet at the given row and column. The end of the region is assumed to be the last non-blank cell in that column. Note that the column identifier must be alphabetic. The worksheet reference is optional; if omitted the first worksheet in the spreadsheet is assumed. Worksheet names that contain spaces must be surrounded by square-brackets ([ and ]). Some examples:
  • Sites!A2. This indicates that the data starts in cell A2 of the "Sites" worksheet.
  • [Site data]!B2. This indicates that the data starts in cell B2 of the "Site data" worksheet.
• [worksheet]! start column start row : end column end row This tells the importer to use the rectangular region of the specified worksheet as defined by the start and end row and column. As before, the worksheet name is optional and all column references must be alphabetic. Some examples:
  • Sites!A2:A123. This indicates that the data starts in cell A2 of the "Sites" worksheet and continues to cell A123.
  • [Site data]!B2:C123. This indicates that the data starts in cell B2 of the "Site data" worksheet and continues to cell C123. Note that the specified region spans multiple columns; in this case the importer will concatenate the values across each row when generating values. This can be useful when you need to combine values to make entity names. For example, it is common for sectors to be numbered 1, 2, 3, ... on each site, but you might want the sectors to be imported with names formed by joining the sector index to the site name.

Some bindings must be specified, others are optional. For Site entities, you must specify bindings for the X and Y properties (usually longitude and latitude). For Sector and Radio entities (if you are importing them), you must specify a site binding so that the importer knows which site to associate with each sector or radio. Any parameters that do not have a binding will get a default value as specified by the Site Template property of the importer.

Bindings for sector, radio and connection entities are optional. If no bindings are specified for sectors, radios or connections then the importer will apply the Site Template to fill in the blanks.

As an example, suppose your Excel site data looks like this:

We can import this data by specifying the following bindings:

Note that the Structure Height property has an associated unit setting (highlighted above). This has been set to meters ("m") as we know that the data in the spreadsheet is in meters. Note also that the Coordinate Projection property has been set to WGS84, as we know that the location information in the spreadsheet is in this projection (latitude and longitude). You should take care to set these properties appropriately for your own data.

We could now import the site data with these settings. However, we have not specified any sector or radio bindings. In this instance, the Site Template referenced in the Template property will be used to fill in the blanks. The importer above is set up to use the "Tri-Sectored" template, which indicates that each site will be populated with three radios and sectors in a classic 0-120-240 pattern.

If we have data for radio and sectors in our spreadsheet, we can specify additional bindings to import these also. Suppose our spreadsheet also has the following data:

We can set up the following radio bindings:

This will set the name, channel and PA power properties of the radios to the values in the spreadsheet. We can set up the sector bindings in a similar fashion:

This will set the azimuth, downtilt, height, name and location properties to the values in the spreadsheet. Note that properties such as height have units; you should take care to set the units appropriately for your own data. The other field you should examine is the Downtilt Sense. Overture assumes that positive values of downtilt mean that the antenna is pointing towards the floor, but some other tools assume the reverse. You can adjust this field to change the sense of the tilt values that are imported should your source data require it.

Once you are happy with the bindings, you can import your data into Overture.