In this workshop, we're going to assume the senior managers have filled in all our spreadsheets and emailed them back to you. So I'll leave it up to you as to whether you want to fill in the sheets yourself, or you can download the populated sheets attached to this video. In any case, our sheets have been filled in and returned, and they're now in one folder. At the moment, when we open each individual sheet, we can see the total salaries, wages and fringe benefits per business unit. But now we want it for the entire company, ie all business units, we could easily open up each file and manually copy and paste the details into one sheet, but that's going to be really tedious. So let's combine them back into one file so we can calculate the forecasted spend.

Let's start a new workflow and drag in the input data tool. And instead of looking for a specific file, We're going to look in a specific directory. So this directory is where I put all my bu sheets. And I'm going to put in the U wildcard dot XLS x. What this will do is grab each file in the workshop one folder that starts with the letters B, you will press refresh and make sure that our table query line item here is empty and will now go to the join tab and drag in the Union tool. If you recall from video 3.2 the union tool appends multiple data sets stacked under each other, either by field name, or record position.

In this instance, we want to use auto config by field name. Finally, we'll go back to the Layout tab and drag in the output data tool and select a folder to Right now files too. I want to keep it in the same folder, workshop one, and I might just give it a file name or combined business units dot XLS sex and call it sheet one. Under output options, I'll select overwrite file if it finds an existing one. And if we run our workflow and check our folder location, we should see our consolidated file here with all the information that we populated, or the senior managers populated