Report amounts are text, not numbers

[Karl Grant]

On Friday 22 August 2008 11:58:42 satjat wrote:
> I am trying to export data from GnuCash to a usable format, say Excel.
> I only really need the transaction journal, maybe with some filters.
> I have a report exactly the way I want it but I have two major problems:
> 1. The amounts listed are recognized as text by Excel so it is pretty much
> unusable
> 2. Apart from being in text mode, the amounts are also hyperlinks to the
> transactions. That is not so serious but it would be nice if it could be
> solved since clicking tries to open a non existing file and pops up an
> error.
> Thank you all in advance

The way I do this is to create a tranaction report in GNUCash with "table for 
export" option (don't know if this is required) , then select and copy (ctrl - 
c) and Paste Special (as unformatted text) in Open Office Calc. Its a tab 
delimited format  IIRC, I'm sure the same works in excel. Otherwise paste into 
a new text file and simply open it from Excel, there's an import wizard there.

If you have a lot of data  in Excel already you can try finding and replacing ' 
with nothing (  ' being the text identifier) and / or deleting the currency 
symbol the same way. Alternatively, I've noticed that by finding and replacing 
say 1 with 1 or / with / Excel will automatically format the cells (expecially 
with dates). 

Karl

PS. For those that are interested I then use Calc2Qif to save it to a QIF file