User manual

Table Of Contents
86 Chapter 8 Importing, Exporting, and Printing
Exporting CSV and TAB Files from Other Applications
For the best results when importing information into Bento, follow these guidelines:
1 Export your data from the other application as a CSV or TAB file.
1 If your Excel worksheet contains multiple tables, put each table in its own
worksheet, and make sure the column names are in the first row.
1 Note whether your CSV or TAB file contains a row with the column names. Bento
can use the values in that row as field names when you import the information into
a new library. In Bento, these field names appear as labels in form view and as
column names in table view.
1 Make a note of the order of the fields in the CSV or TAB file. If the file doesn’t
contain a row with the column names, you can refer to your notes to manually
name the fields when you import the file.
1 ClarisWorks and AppleWorks create tab-separated files when you select the ASCII
Text option in the Save As dialog. Make sure you add the TAB extension to the
filename when you save an AppleWorks 6 file that you plan to import into Bento.
For example, if you have an AppleWorks file named “MyData” save it as
“MyData.tab” so that Bento recognizes it as a tab-separated file.
Correcting CSV Files
If you are having difficulty importing a CSV file, open it in a text editor and do the
following:
1 Put double quotation marks around field values that have embedded commas.
For example: “10,000 Donors“
1 Put double quotation marks around field values with leading or trailing spaces.
1 Put double quotation marks around field values that contain embedded line-
breaks.