Monday, August 11, 2014

Explanation of CSV and TXT file email attachments

If you have the setting "Email/Include CSV and Text Files" turned on, then you will see the following 3 file attachments in any email you send from Trip Splitter.

1. The Archive .txt file contains all the information that Trip Splitter maintains about expense items. Besides the who paid/who split information, it contains the GPS location information and what is called the "Place" information which in the USA would be things like State, County, City, address, zip code. In other countries local conventions are followed.  This file is a "tab delimited file" and can be imported into other spreadsheet applications that accept such file formats for import.

2. The Splitters .txt file is a tab delimited file of the expense split information. It is designed to be importable into the Google spreadsheet template (discussed below) that can be used to verify your split results. It can also be used to import into other spread sheet applications for general use.

There is a Google spreadsheet template that can be used to verify your split results using the Splitters .txt file.  If you have from 5 to 8 splitters however, then be aware that the last line of that template does not correctly handle reporting the results. The item expense information in the .txt file can be copied and pasted into the shared expenses spreadsheet template. The template may only work with currency formatted in the US standard - periods for decimal places and commas for thousands separators.  The template is at: http://docs.google.com/previewtemplate?id=0As3tAuweYU9QcHlVM3hrY2tocEkzS1hOWEtObTNsZGc&mode=public

3. The Splitters .csv file is a legacy format and contains the expense split information in a comma separated format. However, the Google expense template discussed above was changed to not accept csv files, but tab delimited files, so the CSV file should not be used any longer. Also, if you have commas in any of the exported fields like Name, they will mess up any csv dependent processing. Commas are removed from numeric exports. That however, may cause problems in currencies that use commas as the decimal separator.