Gnucash to and from spreadsheets

[Mike or Penny Novack]

What I always get stuck on is entering a pre existing set of double 
entry accounting data from a spreadsheet into Gnucash and also exporting 
such data from Gnucash to a spreadsheet. I expect I am just missing 
something really obvious but it seems such an important and basic thing 
that I would ask someone to spell it out to me because I feel I cant 
make headway with out being able to achieve this. Steve

Sorry, but the question is unclear. What do you mean by "double entry 
accounting data in a spreadsheet"?

If that question seems strange to you, that's because I can see all 
sorts of ways double accounting could be done using a spreadsheet. Down 
to the equivalent of old fashioned pen and ink on paper accounting (some 
pages"ruled" like a journal, others "ruled" like ledger pages; the only 
modern part being the spreadsheet's ability to always do addition 
correctly").

In other words, I think you are seeing this as a problem only of moving 
between the formats in which data is stored rather than one involving 
the structure of that data itself. It isn't hard, for example, to export 
data from gnucash and then convert that exported file into a 
spreadsheet. But that doesn't mean that the result would look anything 
like the spreadsheet you expected.

Michael D Novack