I actually don't understand Jay's response. The documentation for the five (5) columns of an import file is pretty straight forward. The problem is that it just doesn't work. You can follow instructions exactly in various User Guides and all you get is the useless 'error reading' message. Maybe their QA teams should try the imports occasionally.

I've never had a problem in 14 years of using this module.

Dear Dana,

Why dont u try to save it as an csv file from excel. Normally this method works fine for me.

Hi Randy,
I was also having the exact problem and nothing I did worked until I read Jay's email.
When you do a Save As for your spreadsheet you will see:
Excel 97-2003 (*xls) DO NOT USE THIS ONE
Microsoft Excel 5.9/95 Workbook (*.xls) USE THIS ONE
Give it a go and you will be surprised (as long as you have the actual spreadsheet correct

And just to add some context - when the number changers were written there were very few commercial utilities available for reading in Excel files. Instead of writing one, the most promising library was selected. Once the number changers sold to Sage they were never really updated again. Thus the Excel 95 format is the suggested format. It'll be interesting to see how the web ui changes this tool, if at all.

Thanks for this clarification, and the background. I was able to get a successful import using the 95 format xls; sorry Jay for not appreciating your original response.

We have been preparing data since July for Sage 300, with our production switch occuring on October 3rd. By far the largest battle has been how difficult it is import data into Sage -- amazing that we've been doing this for 4 months.

The next ongoing issue has been finding good current table definition information for writing Views and Stored Procedures for our own utilities -- the best source I've found so far is a collection of webpages written in 2008.

Again, thanks for a more detailed reponse. Randy