Associated workbooks are used to import or export Estimation projects, break out effort/cost/staffing by skill category, and during Estimation Service Round Trip data exchange to store detailed project data and settings used in SLIM-Suite applications, but not stored in SLIM-Collaborate. When estimates are checked out to SLIM-Estimate, shared data from SLIM-Collaborate is augmented with this unshared data to support advanced estimation analysis in SLIM-Estimate. When exporting Collaborate projects, data from the Associated workbook is merged with the Collaborate project record(s) to create a complete SLIM-Suite workbook file.