Dealing with CSV files...

[Steve Tyron]

I must have missed something.

I have a strange work flow that I need to simplify for a customer. He's 
on a PC, I'm on a Mac. He maintains an inventory list of 500 or so 
books, with some dropping off and others being added in any given month. 
I get involved because I do the graphics for several mailings and an 
annual catalog.

He, of course, thinks Excel is the go-to program for even the smallest 
task requiring a few item numbers and prices. Lucky for me I got him 
switched over to Panorama when I explained how much time he would not be 
buying to have me clean up and reformat his information. He knows how to 
do a pretty fair job of adding new entries and then sending me the file. 
I have built an action that does a great job of cleaning up the files 
(removing lots of empty records he creates by accident) and organizing 
the list by the unique sort method we use for the catalog sections. So 
far, so good.

Now the new wrinkle: his wife has signed them up for an online store. 
That new project now MANDATES that CSV files be uploaded, and the files 
MUST contain each of 32 categories with SPECIFIC names, none of which 
actually match the names we use for "title, author, blurb, code, etc".

I have had to recreate a "stepping stone" duplicate of out database of 
just 12 categories, padding it with empty columns to meet the 
requirement, and giving new names to all the data before it gets 
uploaded to the store.

The problem I can't get past is how Panorama imports a CSV file. I have 
automated my "Save as..." step to create the CSV file, but IMPORTing 
that file into a Panorama "template" database, all I get is a first 
chunk with double quotes, then the "blurb" section is broken into 
separate pieces every time there is a comma in a sentence. If I skip
iIMPORT text" and simply OPEN the CSV data directly, it works just fine, 
with all data neatly put into individual columns as I would expect.

The only way past this that I can see is to write an involved procedure 
that will collect the data from the original file (this is already 
handled), and then open a new database, add columns in a specific order, 
and do some fill commands (some of the unused columns have to have a 
TRUE or FALSE content to satisfy the storefront software).

I guess I can think of writing the procedure as a learning process, but 
wow, why can't Panorama correctly import CSV into my template database?

Thanks,

Steve

PS: All this automation is needed because my customer dreams of handling 
this whole task on their own.