Out of curiosity...

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Steve wrote:

>My question was sincerely posed with NO other accounting package in the back
>of my mind, or that I'm considering, or in my imagination; I was just
>curious how successful anyone has been, in trying to export GnuCash's
>structure and data to ANY other financial program.  Was a simple question.
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My response was perhaps misunderstood. You are asking whether anybody 
has had success EXPORTING gnucash data to some other application rather 
than asking whether anybody had success IMPORTING gnucash data into some 
other application and why that is something you would expect to see 
where that other application was being discussed. I was saying that an 
application does into normally provide for exporting its data but might 
well have provisions for importing data of other applications.

For example, if I were to write a tool (a program) able to access 
gnucash's DATA and write that data out in a format usable by some other 
application I would have no need to know anything about gnucash EXCEPT 
the formats in which its data was stored. << and yes, this is the sort 
of thing they paid me for in my working days >> I would need to know the 
data descriptions in great detail but the program processing  not at 
all. You would expect me to be working for (paid or as a volunteer) of 
this other application and the people who would be using this tool would 
be users of that application, not users of gnucash. For a concrete 
example, gnucash does have facilities for importing data from some other 
applications. But would you expect current users of these other 
applications to know anything about these facilities?

On the other hand, I believe I do understand the WHY of your question, 
what your concern might be. "If gnucash doesn't work out for me, how 
hard would it be to import my gnucash data into application X as my fall 
back position". Well where you need to go is to discussion lists of 
application X (or X's if more than one possibility) to look for 
"importing data from gnucash". This is simply the wrong place.

Michael D Novack