Archival Data Quality

Introduction

Archiving preserves data for prosterity. The goal of archiving documents is to take a snapshot of the data as they were at the time of archiving. Then, the documents may at a later time be made accessible to a user, either the original data producer, a researcher or anyone interested, who have legitimate access rights to the documents. Ideally, the document should be as similar as possible to the original document, they were copied from, both in content and structure, but technical changes may be performed by the archive in order to ensure persistent accessibility to the document throughout changing technological landscapes. This may result in data loss, but if so it must be reduced to the minimum and it must be documented.

Here follows a list of requirements, which CLISC checks for and performs actions to the archived spreadsheet in order to make sure the spreadsheet meets the necessary data quality level for long-term storage. If archiving is not selected when using CLISC, the list of requirements will not be followed.

Archival requirements

Embedded objects

Risk

Solution

External Relationships

Risk

Solution

RTD functions

Microsoft Office Excel provides a worksheet function, RealTimeData (RTD). This function enables you to call a Component Object Model (COM) Automation server to retrieve data in real time.

The RTD function uses the following syntax =RTD(RealTimeServerProgID,ServerName,Topic1,[Topic2], ...)

Source

Risk

When opening an archived spreadsheet many years from now, the server connection might still be available and the values will auto-update. This intervenes with the archival goal of taking snapshots of data at a given time.

Solution

Remove any RTD formula functions in cells in any sheet in a spreadsheet, but keep the actual cell values as the snapshot.