Importing Customers and Vendors from Sage Line 50

[Uttam Chakravorty]

I am a newbie.  I am not here to document my failures, but only to share what worked for me.  Perhaps it can form the basis for a feature request.  I hope I do not breach any protocols.  Please accept my apology in advance in case I do.

I am in UK and have been using Sage Line 50 for a long time.  I exported the Customer and Supplier list to csv from within the program.

Using Ubuntu I took my first look at GnuCash today.  I noted the default view of Customer/Vendor displays: Company Name, ID, Address1, Address2, Phone.

As this is a learning curve, I decided to do the minimum.  I imported sage outputs into LibreOffice and formatted as follows:
Column 1 = Company Number / ID
Column 2 = Company Name
Column 3 = left blank - couldn't see the point of doing something that may not display
Column 4 = Town
Column 5 = Postcode
Column 6 = Telephone number 

When exiting LibreOffice I used Save As ->
Name = new_name.csv
Format = Text CSV (.csv)
Checked the Edit filter settings
When prompted selected: Use Text CSV format / Field delimiter = comma / Text delimiter = nothing

I then opened the file in Bluefish -> at the end of every line ending with a telephone number I added two commas (a blank field).  The ones without telephone numbers already had blank fields.

I then opened GnuCash -> Import Customer / Vendor -> Chose file -> Selected Customer / Vendor -> selected comma separated.  When I finally got the sequence right, the Preview pane populated straight away.

Maybe someone with the requisite skills could review how the csv files are being parsed?  I wish to thank the team for what it has done so far.

Best regards, Uttam