ACT2Excel (A2E) is a flexible utility that tries to meet a variety of ACT! to Excel integration demands.

Here are the most common modes of operation that we have anticipated in the design of A2E.

1. Field Math: Contact field math
2. Invoice/Quote: Moving data from the current ACT! contact to a spreadsheet template for documents such as an Invoice or Quote.
3. Export: Exporting from the current contact or lookup to a predefined XLS spreadsheet template.
4. Append: Appending info from the current contact or lookup to an XLS file (such that the same file has rows added to it each time you run A2E).

Field Math

With Field Math, no new XLS file is created. The only purpose of the XLS file is to “pull” contact data from the current contact, do some standard Excel computations, and “push” contact data back into ACT!.

You might use this for mortgage calculations, for example. Enter Loan Amt, Interest and # of payments into contact fields in ACT!, then run A2E to compute (and fill in) the Monthly payment field. (There is no limit to the fields that can be read or written, so you can do arbitrarily complex computations.)

This all happens without Excel being visible, so the ACT! user just sees fields being filled in.

Invoice / Quote

In this mode, data from the current contact is “pulled” from ACT! and placed in any cell you want in the template spreadsheet. Typically used for pulling Contact name, Company, Address, Phone, etc fields from ACT! and placing them into the proper cells in a predefined template.

The output in this mode is a “Save As” copy of the original template, and the original template is left unchanged. A2E can generate a filename for the output, and can also attach the file

Export

Export mode takes a template with a contact field per column and exports the current lookup a spreadsheet.

But can’t ACT! already do that? Well, yes, but A2E adds several interesting features.

1. The output columns are defined by the template, not by the columns you happen to have picked in the Contact List View.
2. ACT! starts with a blank spreadsheet and writes to that. Because A2E starts with a template, you can add any formatting you want, or other analysis options such as charts and pivot tables. Those advanced features will be present in the file created by A2E, along with the ACT! data.
3. The new file can have a predefined “Save As” name and can also be attached to the Documents Tab.

Append

Append can be used to build a sales log, or as a “poor man’s Quickbooks”. Each time you run A2E on an XLS file set up with Append mode, A2E opens that file, finds the first free row, and adds the current contact (or current lookup) data to that row (or rows for a lookup).

This mode is different than the others, as the template and the output file are one in the same.

What A2E isn’t

A2E does not currently support

• Company fields
• Group Fields
• Sales / Opportunities
• Notes or History records (other than optionally attaching a created XLS file)

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