QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Importing and Exporting Customer Information

Chances are you store customer information in other applications besides QuickBooks, such as a customer relationship management program to track customer interactions or a word processing application to produce mailing labels. Re-entering the same information more than once is not only mind-numbingly tedious—it wastes time you should spend on more important aspects of your business, such as selling, managing cash flow, or finding out who has the incriminating pictures from the Christmas party. If the other programs you use support delimited text files, you can avoid data entry grunt work by transferring data to or from QuickBooks. Delimited text files are nothing more than files that separate each piece of data with a comma, a space, a tab, or other character. The same kind of information appears in the same position in each line, so other programs can pull the information into the right places.

POWER USERS' CLINIC : The Easy Way to View Data

Data is easier to examine when you view an export or import file with a spreadsheet program, such as Excel, as described in Chapter 21. Most programs can open or import text delimited files, but Excel is a master at reading the records stored in these text files. When you export data to a text delimited file and then open it in Excel, the program pigeonholes the data into cells in a spreadsheet. Because records and fields appear in rows and columns respectively, you can quickly identify, select, ...