Importing Products Records

[Elbonrules]

We are currently running Sage Line 50 and a separate dBase Invoicing/Stock Control system importing the invoice data on a daily basis. We are now considering migrating the stock system into Sage but, although the import of Product Records works OK the following problem has arisen. The description of each stock item is an amalgam of 4 fields from the database and I have tried to retain the field size of each of these fieldsby inserting blanks so that the data appears in Sage in nice neat readable columns within the description. The csv file looks OK and the columns are maintained but, when I run the import, Sage appears to apply proportional spacing to the data removing trailing blanks and consequently the apparent column structure is lost making the stock description difficult to read . Is there anyway I can resolve this

[brucedenney]

I think trying to put more than one thing into a field is always going to cause problems, how about putting it into separate fields in Sage, e.g. the comments fields.

If you want to see them on the screen, then perhaps, using a field like commodity code which can be displayed on the main screen?

The proportional spacing of the font used is probably applied by windows, I suspect you could use a fixed spaced font but windows might look really weird.

The csv looks okay, only because you use a fixed space font to view it.

Not sure, why they need to line up so, can't really help more.

[Elbonrules]

Thanks Bruce,

I rather expected that I wouldn't be able to import the description while keeping the component fields in the required columns.

Thanks anyway for your efforts

[brucedenney]

component fields?

Sounds like a BOM to me, have you looked at BOM's?

[Elbonrules]

Hi Bruce,

Sorry, but I think I may have misled you by using the word "component". I think the best way of showing my problems is by the following. My company supplies and fits car and truck tyres and the database system (which I wrote) has been successfully used by our staff for over 20 year and , the main feature is how they use the system to respond to customer telephone enquiries. For example, if a customer phones and is looking for a tyre size 195/65x15, my system has a simple query so that when the size is keyed in all the tyres in stock are shown for that size showing the manufacturer, tread pattern, ply and cost and sales prices as

Bridgestone SP200E 91V 100.00 120.00
Toyo Profiler 88W 100.00 120.00
Hankook ST11 91T 100.00 120.00

The problem is that the manufacture can vary from 4 characters up to 14 characters and the other fields also vary. The fact that they are shown in my system in columns make it easy to scan a page of say 20 items but, it is this columnar display that I lose when I import the file into Sage and in the above example the space between Bridgestone and SP is applied to the Toyo tyre which moves Profiler etc several positions to the left making a visual scan very difficult.

As I said previously, I don't expect that there is an easy answer to this but, I appreciate your continued efforts to find one.

Sorry for being so long winded

Cheers

Ian

[brucedenney]

If the database system works well (and my assumption is that based on 20 years use it does) then why abandon it?

We could get this other information into other fields but that wont be much help during a lookup.

My only practical suggestion would be to change the order so the most variable data was on the right, at least this way it would be "more lined up"