I am quite intimidated. See the need to import my bank transactions into calc using .csv format. Have tried in the past. Don’t really know what to do with it once I get it imported. Is there a tutorial for beginners that would hold my hand and walk me through this process? What I need to do is import my transactions for the year into calc so I can manipulate it to create reports. At this moment I am facing entering each transaction by hand. for the love of kittens, can someone help me? I can follow step by step directions if they are very clear. this certainly exists.
Why do you think so? Even the contents of .csv are not very clear, so the process needs often some thinking…
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But start here, if you like:
https://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=77069
What do you want to achieve? Nobody can help you with directions unless you can name a destination…
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Have you consulted your bank? They often have ready made solutions available for customers wishing to import their data to a spreadsheet.
This is the only information you have provided. And there is only one thing I can extract from that: “I tried to do something, saw something, and I have some problem - possibly it didn’t do what I expected it to (but I didn’t tell)”.
Instead of “I have an unspecified problem, so provide me with something magical and universally correct”, start with “Here is what I have, here is what I do, here is what I see, here is what I expect … how to change what I see into what I expect”. Please provide a sample CSV; since it’s some bank data, make sure to replace any sensitive data there with some dummy replacements.
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csv is not a file format.
3 lines of different data, but same information:
31/1/2026,"1,234.56"
01/31/2026,$1234.56
31. Januar 2026;1.234,56
Calc makes it easy to intuitively choose the right cultural context in order to import correct data from any flavour of csv data. Choose the correct locale and check option “Detect special numbers”.
First sample: Choose English(UK) and comma as columns separator. The double-quote around the decimal number is necessary because the decimal has an additional comma as thousands separator. Do NOT select option “quoted fields as text” because that would import the quoted decimal as a text value.
Second sample: English(USA) because of the obvious Month/Day/Year date and because of the $ sign in front of the decimal.
Third sample: Locale is German(Germany) because of the date notation with a German month name, the comma as decimal separator and point as thousands separator. The column separator is a semicolon.
Calc can easily import any of the above samples and thousands of other variants, but there is no AI to decide if 1/2/2025 refers to first of February or second of January or if 1,234 is meant to be a comma-decimal or a whole number with a thousands separator.
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pardon. am I supposed to make a new post to update my original one, or am I supposed to comment to update? Thank you to all who have responded. You are all absolutely correct. It is the intimidation which causes me to be so vague when I am attempting to ask for help. I appreciate everyone’s patience. I have downloaded gnucash and am following the tutorial and concepts guide, the wizard -i guess-, and now I’m trying to find the online documentation. I have set up a few accounts and am going now to try to import transactions. Maybe I’m on the right track.
Gnucash is a dedicated application for accounting. You may notice that it can’t import csv data automatically neither. Every software needs some hints about the actual meaning encoded in the plain text data because csv is not standardized.
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