QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Importing Data from Other Programs

Importing data from other programs comes in handy mostly for generating lists in QuickBooks. The biggest requirement for importing data is that the other program must be able to produce delimited text files, which separate each piece of information with commas or tabs. But QuickBooks also needs to know the kind of data you're importing—and it learns that from special keywords for row and column headers. (Keywords for columns of imported data, which correspond to fields in a QuickBooks record, like a customer record, appear in one row of delimited text near the beginning of the comma-delimited file. A keyword for a row is the text before the first comma.)

Figure 21-9. 1. In the first cell in the first row for a list, an exclamation point in front of the keyword tells QuickBooks that the data in the following rows is for that list. !INVITEM indicates data for the Item List. 2. Keywords in the other cells of the first row for a list specify the QuickBooks field names. In cell B11, the keyword NAME identifies the values in that column as the name of the item. In cell E11, NVITEMTYPE identifies the keywords in that column as the type of item, such as SERV for Service. 3. Each row that begins with INVITEM in the first cell represents another item record. 4. The cells in a row contain the values that QuickBooks imports into the designated fields.

For example, ...