About Importing Formats

Import formats are special file descriptions used when importing data from other applications. A format is stored in a format file.

Importing data allows you to transfer data from an existing file into the database. For example, you may want to gather data from a utility billing package to populate the Requesters Library. The application that contains the source data may have tools that export data or reports to a .txt file.

Expect to analyze efforts towards data requirements prior to importing, and the targeted applications need to produce a TXT, TAB, or CSV file.

CSV files generated by an export that will be used for importing must use ANSI encoding.