Let's say that you have a contact management system to keep track of customers, prospects, and other contacts. You find that you are entering all the customer contact information in one system and then either re-entering or copying and pasting all of that information again in the other application. You want to avoid this by entering the data in one application and then exporting from that application to import into the other application. This will avoid duplicate work and the possibility of errors.
- 1. Prerequisites: Save the GnuCash MACS data in the SQLite3 format. Connect to it from OpenOffice.org Base, create a query to pull the customer contact information including contact name, address, and phone number, and save the query as Query1.
- 2. Launch OpenOffice.org Calc and from the menu, select View | Data Sources. You should see all data sources available in the left pane.
- 3. You should see MACS in that list. Click on the + sign to expand it and expand the Queries again by clicking on its + sign. You should see the Query1 you earlier saved in OpenOffice.org Base. Click on Query1 and you should see the data in the right pane. This will serve as a preview to make sure that is the data you want to export.
- 4. Drag Query1 and drop it on cell A1 of the spreadsheet below, as shown in the next screenshot.
- 5. Now that the data you need is in a spreadsheet, you can save this as a CSV format file.
- 6. You can now import this CSV format file into your contact management system.
Is GnuCash the only application that you use to run your business? Not likely. While each business is unique, it is likely that you use one or more of the following types of applications.
- Shared Address Book, Contact Management, or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) System.
- Point of Sale (POS) or Inventory Management System.
- Payroll or Time Keeping System.
- Other systems: Cash flow management tool, Expense, Receipt, Time, and Mileage Tracking Systems, Online Invoicing Service, Document Management System, and so on.
While you are still going to have to work within the limitations of what data each of these applications will allow you to import, your options have improved significantly with the availability of export to the SQL database feature in GnuCash.
We covered what data you can import into GnuCash and in what formats, extensively in another chapter. You may find that there are lots of limitations in what data you can import into GnuCash. However, your ability to export data out of GnuCash has gone up dramatically by using this new Export to SQL database feature. You can export and extract all and any data that is in GnuCash.
- GnuCash doesn't have a field for which of the following contact info?
a. E-mail address
b. LinkedIn username
c. FAX number
d. Twitter username