Exporting Reports and Data to Other Programs

Any of the Tab View reports, as well as almost any report grid in a dialog such as Find Customer, can be exported.  You can also export any of the raw data tables found in the Maintenance / Raw Data Tables functions.

There are two ways to get the data in another program -- through Copy/Paste, or with the Export to CSV function.

Copy/Paste

To copy data directly to another program such as Excel, just highlight the desired cells on any grid report (or press Ctrl-A to select all cells), then Ctrl-Insert or Ctrl-C to copy to the clipboard.  Then switch to the other application and paste the data.  The data is copied in Tab-delimited format, so it can be pasted into nearly any program that supports Tab-delimited data or text.  However, only the data cells can be copied this way, not the header row and column.  To get the entire report into another program, use the Export to CSV function.

Exporting to Tab-Delimited Format

As mentioned above, when data is copied from a grid it's already in tab-delimited format.  Thus you can create a tab-delimited export file by using the copy function above, then open Notepad or any text editor, and paste the data into it.  Then save the file as a ".txt" file.  However, as mentioned above, this will not contain the header rows or columns.  To get the headers you must use the CSV export function below.

Exporting to CSV Format

"CSV" is a common file format, which stands for "Comma Separated Values".  You can export any of the grid reports to a CSV file which can be loaded into a spreadsheet like Excel, or loading into a PDA like a Palm or Pocket PC.  When a report is exported to a CSV file, it will contain all of the data and also the headers, just as shown in the current view or dialog grid.

To begin the export, either use the Export Current View option on the File menu (this is used for any tab view report), or click the Export List button on any of the other dialogs that have a grid-type report.  Alternatively you can press Ctrl-F10, which will work for any of the supported reports.

Next you will see the standard file dialog.  Just enter the filename and select the location (navigate to the desired folder) and click Save.  The file will have the extension ".csv" so it's recognized by other software as a CSV file.

To get the data into your other software, you'll need to locate the appropriate function.  This is usually an "Import" function under a "File" menu, but programs can vary.

If you want to load the exported data into a Palm PDA, you will need to use a 3rd-party program that can read CSV files.  Many such programs are available.  We recommend a popular program called MiniCalc, which sells for around $30.

Technical notes: To ensure that data with commas is imported properly, all fields are enclosed in quotes.  Most CSV import functions will remove the quotes properly.  Also, if the data itself includes the double-quote character ("), these will be doubled up in the text, e.g.: quotes(") becomes "quotes ("")".  This is the CSV standard for dealing with commas and quotes within the text.