When exporting from Business Contact Manager, records that have a second line
in the business street (an apartment number, for example) receive either a
hard or soft return in the resulting .csv file, disabling the ability to
accurately reimport the data. Does anyone know of a solution to this
problem? Thanks.
Chris
This has gone back and forth as long as I've worked with CSV files.
And it's a reason XML files have replaced CSV in many places. What to
do about new lines in a file? Some applications can handle new lines
in fields in CSV files so long as the field is enclised in quotes.
Other applications insist that a CSV file may only contain a single
record per line. Apparently BCM walks a fine line between importing
and exporting CSV files from the most popular applications, which are
not the same (users tend to migrate--import--CSV data from older
applications, and export CSV data to utilities), and BCM changes the
defaults in subtle ways with releases. A corrollary issue is character
encoding: why does BCM read ASCII CSV files and export Unicode CSV
files? I expect because that's what most users need, or the users that
want that scream the loadest.
Note that they, BCM, have always said that for symmetrical export and
imports--transferring data from BCM to BCM--you should use the BCM
(XML) format, and only use CSV as a last resort. BCM uses BCM files to
transfer data between offline and shared databases, and for moving
data from their ACT and QB migration utility to BCM.
