importing data

[tereque]

On 21/07/2012 15:54, tereque wrote:
> ... I need people to work with external data sources that I would like to
> import into gnucash (as the 'master' accounts so to say).
>
> most logical would seem to me to import another gnucash file but I only
> can find a 'replay gnucash logfile'option on the import section. I tried
> this but nothing seems to happen. Did I do it wrong (>file >import
>  >replay gnucash file >choose)or is there any way to import a gnucash
> account into another?

no comments on this so far. is there a way?

> importing csv (being produced in Excel in our case) is a workable way of
> course but I wonder whether it may be possible to import data from two
> different fields of the Excle CSV into the 'desription' of gnucash. It
> seems that it is opnly allowed to map one field only to the
> 'description', It is not essential but would make life easier somehow.

a workaround i figured myself is to to the gathering work in the 
spreadsheet the data comes from. In my case it is Excel but I figured 
the formula is the exact same in ooffice.

you just gather or combine date of several field into a new field

basic formula is =A1&A2

that leads to display of both cells content in the cell you paste the 
formula. problem: there is nothing in between to separate the contents 
from each other (not even space). to achieve separation you have to add

=A1&"|"&A2

which leads to a separation as you chose between the "   ". In my 
example the two contents are separated with a |, but it can bee 
basically whatever you want. One might want to be cautious using 
mathematical things like -, +, / as separators though. I am not sure how 
these would behave once such a file would be reopened in the spreadsheet 
software and maybe stuff gets interpreted in a mathematical way which 
might lead to wrong display.

Use of such formula is not supported by a CSV file, so before importing 
this into gnuchash this file has to be 'saved as CSV' again.
The cell containing the combined data has to be cut 'n' pasted as it's 
content only before saving (maybe that happens even automatically once 
you process the 'saves as CSV')