unofficial microsoft.public.money FAQ and A
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Conversion, Programmability, External interfaces

Q) How do I import from Excel (or .CSV or etc.)?

A) Money can only import .QIF format data, entire Quicken files (into a new Money file, with the restriction that it be from an older version of Quicken than the version of Money doing the importing) and, in more recent Money versions, OFX and OFC format data. OFC support was removed from M05. (Incidentally, QIF support was removed from Q05.)

Once upon a time, Microsoft provided an Excel macro that wrote .QIF format files from Excel. Unfortunately, that macro is an old XLM style macro and Excel has not supported that type of macro for many versions now. Microsoft has never seen fit to issue any new capability like this. As of this writing, it appears that even the Knowledge Base article has been disappeared.

Having said that, it is worth noting that QIF is just a text file with a format that is not, apparently, all that complex. It should be reasonably straightforward for someone used to mucking around in VBA for Excel to write code to generate passable QIF files. The QIF file format is an ad hoc standard semi-documented by Quicken. The references, all identified from a search at google, may help you get there. There were many more references that were not included here and these references may not be good currently. If you create some code for this, please report back here and offer it up to the community.

One reader, Didier Lachièze, has done just that. Several readers have reported good results with Didier's macro. Didier has also developed a web page that provides resource links to other similar tools.

Another reader, Ron Rosenfeld, reported on a shareware CSV to QIF converter written by James Lavery of Monthtwo Systems. There has been no other feedback on this tool.

(These things must be really popular lately.) There's another one written by a guy named John. No user reports on it yet, either.

Chris Cowles reported yet another CSV to QIF converter--built to go with a personal finance manager application for Palm, the web site for which provides yet another spin on QIF documentation.

Colin Smales asked me to include a reference to his MT2OFX converter tool that provides conversions of a number of different formats to OFX.

References:
Another attempt to document QIF
Colin Smale's MT2OFX format conversion tool
CSV to QIF revisited
Didier Lachièze's Excel to QIF macro
Didier Lachièze's QIF conversion resource page
google.com
John's XL to QIF
Monthtwo Systems' CSV to QIF shareware
MSKB: Q077220 Excel to .QIF macro
QIF Apple-centric documentation, but maybe still valid
QIF documented by the GnuCash folks
QIF documented maybe a little less well
QIF documented yet again and app for Palm
QIF documented

Please see this disclaimer if you are using Money 2005 or this comment if you are using Money 2006.

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Conversion, Programmability, External interfaces
Q) How do I export to Excel (or .TXT, .XML, .CSV)?
Conversion, Programmability, External interfaces
Q) I've decided to convert from Money to Quicken. How do I do this?

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Last update: 10 December 2006

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