Chapter 6: Reporting Your Progress

The Dashboard, Excel exports, spreadsheet round-trip, and consolidating team workbooks.

Mapping work doesn't happen in isolation. Stakeholders need to see progress, SMEs need to review and annotate mappings, and on larger engagements multiple analysts may be working in parallel on separate workbooks that eventually need to be consolidated. This chapter covers the tools that connect Bridger's internal workspace to the outside world: the Dashboard for quick status views, Excel exports for stakeholder review, the spreadsheet round-trip for collecting and re-importing feedback, and the merge workflow for bringing team members' work together.

The Dashboard

The Dashboard is a top-level item in the menu bar. It is populated with all report templates defined in the workbook's configuration — selecting a template generates an abbreviated report and displays it in a viewer window. This is designed for quick, at-a-glance status: a project manager walking into a review session can pull up the Dashboard and show mapping completion percentages on a shared screen in seconds without exporting anything.

From the report viewer you can export the full report to an Excel-compatible spreadsheet if you need a file to distribute or archive.

Exporting to Excel

For a full export with template selection and output path control, use File → Export…. The dialog lets you choose which report template to use and where to save the file.

The Default Report Templates

Every new workbook ships with four report templates. Three are for reporting; one is the schema import template you've already used.

Comprehensive Mapping Report covers all projects in the workbook. It produces five sheets: project statistics, source-to-target mappings, target-to-source mappings, and separate table statistics for both sides. This is the template to use when preparing a complete picture of the engagement for leadership review or when consolidating work across multiple project areas.

Current Project Mapping Report is the same structure scoped to the active project only. Use this for focused review sessions with the SME or client team responsible for a specific data domain.

Library Reference exports the library contents: source tables and columns, target tables and columns, with usage statistics showing which tables are referenced by which projects. Useful for onboarding new analysts or documenting the schema inventory.

Report templates are fully configurable in the Configuration area — sheets, columns, sort order, and scope are all adjustable. The defaults are comprehensive starting points; teams typically customize them as the engagement matures. Full template editing is covered in Appendix A.

The Spreadsheet Round-Trip

The most common use of Excel export isn't archiving — it's the review cycle. You export the mappings, distribute the spreadsheet to an SME or client reviewer, they annotate it with feedback, and you re-import their changes back into the workbook. Bridger is built to support this cycle explicitly.

What Can Be Written Back

Not every column in an export is writable on re-import. Columns marked as round-trip writable — status, transformation logic content, notation content, and similar fields — can be updated by importing a modified spreadsheet. Schema fields like data type and column name are read-only; they reflect the source-of-truth schema and cannot be overwritten from a spreadsheet.

The complete list of round-trip writable fields is documented in Appendix B: Source Path Reference, where writable fields are marked with a ↔ tag in the listing.

Re-Importing a Reviewed Spreadsheet

When the annotated spreadsheet comes back, use File → Import… → Import Spreadsheet… to bring the changes in. Bridger reads the writable columns and updates the corresponding mappings. Changes are applied in place — existing mappings are updated rather than replaced, so notations and properties that were not in the spreadsheet are preserved.

Consolidating Team Workbooks

On larger engagements it's common to split mapping work across analysts — one workbook per data domain, one per project area, or simply one per analyst. Eventually that work needs to come together into a single comprehensive workbook. Bridger provides two paths for this: Import Workbook for merging all projects from another workbook, and Import Components for selectively pulling specific configuration elements.

Import Workbook

Use File → Import… → Import Workbook… to merge the contents of another workbook into the current one. The process has two steps.

First, select the file. As soon as you pick it, Bridger runs a compatibility analysis automatically — no separate button to click. The analysis compares the incoming workbook's configuration against the current workbook's configuration, checking for conflicts: status codes with the same name but different properties, notation type definitions that don't match, library table inconsistencies. The results appear in a report you can read and copy.

If no blocking conflicts are found, the Merge button becomes available and the report indicates the workbook is ready to merge. Conflicts that would produce irreconcilable inconsistencies block the merge entirely until they're resolved — typically by aligning the configuration of one workbook to match the other before retrying. Once the merge runs, all projects, library tables, and mappings from the incoming workbook are added to the current one. A validation and repair pass runs automatically afterward to ensure the merged result is clean.

Import Components

Use File → Import… → Import Components… to selectively pull specific configuration elements from another workbook without merging its projects or mappings. This is the tool for keeping workbook configurations synchronized across a team: if one analyst has refined the logic template library or added new status codes, Import Components lets you bring just those pieces into your own workbook without touching anything else.

What's Next

Reports get your work in front of reviewers; feedback comes back through the round-trip; consolidated workbooks bring the team's work together. The remaining challenge in a long engagement is change — schemas evolve, requirements shift, and approved mappings sometimes need to be revisited. Chapter 7: Dealing with Change covers schema sync, table comparison, and workbook comparison for managing that evolution.