The Custom Spreadsheets module in EnergyCAP Enterprise can be both wonderful and frustrating at the same time! This flexible tool allows users to execute custom queries on the EnergyCAP database, giving users access to data which may not be available with any of the stock reports which come with the application.

That's the wonderful part. The frustrating part comes when you run your favorite spreadsheet and it returns zero rows of data, even though you KNOW there's data to display. The "zero rows" phenomenon is EnergyCAP's way of "failing gracefully" to recover from any of several possible errors. In this article, I hope to clarify one possible problem and the solution for the "zero rows" message.

Sometimes, the "zero rows" message is caused by older Custom Spreadsheet Templates in your EnergyCAP database.

EnergyCAP Enterprise ships with several Custom Spreadsheet Template versions. These Templates are stored in an XML file which is located in the installation directory for EnergyCAP. This file will be named "ECAP_CustomSpreadsheets_v6_2_DB64.xml" or something similar to it.

It is likely that when your database was set up, a Project Manager installed this XML file for you, populating the Custom Spreadsheets module with templates. However, over time, changes in the EnergyCAP database structure, fixes for Custom Spreadsheet bugs, and the addition of new Custom Spreadsheet Templates may require changes to the Custom Spreadsheets XML file.

When EnergyCAP Enterprise is upgraded to a new version of the software, you may wish to check the release notes and/or the installation directory to see if the XML file has been updated. If it has, you may import the latest XML file from the Custom Spreadsheets module. Instructions for doing this can be found here (http://help.energycap.com/analyzing-data/custom-spreadsheets/exporting-and-importing-a-custom-spreadsheet/?searchterm=import%20custom%20spreadsheets).

When new Custom Spreadsheet Template versions are imported, the information in the XML file is imported directly into the EnergyCAP database. From then on, the Custom Spreadsheet information including filters, data types, queries, and other data "lives" in the database, where it can only be manipulated by the EnergyCAP Enterprise application or database manipulation. This is why manually updating the Custom Spreadsheet Templates is necessary on a periodic basis.