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Introduction to Exports in Books by HansaWorld

The 'Exports' function allows you to export certain information from your Books by HansaWorld database to tab-delimited text files from where you can incorporate it in word processing programs for mailmerge, in spreadsheets for further statistical analysis or in page make-up programs for incorporation in publicity material or published reports. In many cases, you can also import the information into other Books by HansaWorld databases or Companies using the 'Automatic' and 'Manual file search' import functions in the System module. Remember that you can also print reports to disk, so most of the information that is stored in Books by HansaWorld is available to other applications via the medium of the text file.

Click the [Routines] button in the Master Control panel. A list of routines appears:

Click the [Exports] button in the list of routines to open the list of Export functions. You can also use the ⌘-E (Mac OS X) or Ctrl-E (Windows) keyboard shortcut to open this list, whose contents will vary with the selected module.

Double-click the item in the list that you need. A specification window will then appear, where you can decide the contents of the export file. Click [Run] again and a 'Save File' dialog box will appear, where you can name the file and determine where it is to be saved.

By default, text files exported from a Books by HansaWorld database will contain Unicode characters. You can change this by specifying a Default Export Codepage in the Local Machine setting in the User Settings module.

As well as exporting information to text files, you can also use the Exports routine to back up your Books by HansaWorld database. For full details about how to do this, please refer to the Backing Up page. For security reasons, the 'Company Text Backup' and 'Database Text Backup' exports do not produce text files as mentioned above but encrypted files that can only be read by another copy of Books by HansaWorld.

Be careful when opening a Books by HansaWorld Export file with Microsoft Excel with the intention of editing it before importing it to a new database. Under certain circumstances, Excel will, when opening a text file, convert some variables that it interprets as dates into its own internal date format. Where you are expecting a date to appear in the spreadsheet you may see a number such as "35475". When you save the spreadsheet again as a text file these variables will not be converted back to date format. So, if you import this text file to Books by HansaWorld, the dates will not be correct. To avoid this problem, make sure you use the third step of Excel's Import Wizard to set all imported columns to 'text' format (highlight all the columns in the Data Preview area using the Shift key and select 'Text' as the Column Data Format). You cannot open files created using the 'Database Text Backup' and 'Company Text Backup' functions in Excel as they are not text files.

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