I personally use it whenever I hit print or email on an invoice.  I have many clients using the feature for PO's, SO's, quotes, invoices, and possibly some cheques still.

The feature has been in the program for about 25 years since version 6 I believe from 1996.  It is possible the people you spoke with have not been with the company that long.

What you have stated about it's setup and use is correct.  I don't recall ever tracking down the location on a Win10 machine but I just had a client using Simply 2008 that I had to reset up and they were forced to switch from Win8 or 8.1 to Win 10.  Their invoices still printed.

One catch is that you have to have your Windows date format in US style, not Canadian and in at least some versions of Sage 50 the date format in Sage 50 should be US style as well.  This has been a bug in the system at least 20 years.  Then the dates will export properly as date fields.  If you use the Date_STR fields, then it likely doesn't matter but I haven't tracked that in years.

I believe only sysadmin in single-user mode can set the check box for the Exporting the csv files.  However, unlike the rest of the Reports & Forms options, this one is system wide, not user-defined.  So once checked properly, it is checked for everyone who uses the file.

If you close Sage 50, the csv files are deleted.  This is to help maintain security in the program.  Other than not hitting print before you check for the files, this is the only reason I can think of that you don't see the files in the location you have indicated.  I guess one other thought is that the CAN**** in the path is not the \CAN folder.  **** should be replaced by the year of the program you are using.  eg. \CAN2021.

What do you see the the folder?  There should be a schema.ini file at all times.

Hi Richard,

Thanks for responding to my post so fast.

When I selected the Form Data Export check box I was logged in as my user account (which is not sysadmin) and in multiuser. I'm not sure what was going on while trying to use this feature yesterday, but It does appear to be working today.

We are currently running version 2021.1.1. In this version the export CSV file appears to be user selectable. I have logged in using both a standard user account in multi user and sys admin in single user, and this setting does not seem to be applied globally which will be nice as not all users will need to export CSV data. Just users that need to work with Client orders.

I should have been more clear about the file path that I was looking in for the CSV files. I was monitoring the CAN2021 folder, I just had the four stars in the post as the year will change depending on version of Sage 50 that a user is running. Yes, the schema.ini file is always present in the folder, and Sage does delete all other files when you close it.

The format of the CSV files is significantly different than what I was expecting. I thought I would see one file containing all the information of the client order, but it produces 7 different files. Each print operation will overwrite the files previously generated with no change to the file name. I have only monitored this while printing a client order.

I have not played with the date format yet, but I will review that when we get to that point and let you know what we find.

Is there any documentation available on the format of the CSV files? We intend to use them to produce inventory documentation to send with our techs in the field.

I just tested 2021.1.1 again and I am still seeing the same rights and privileges as I mentioned before.  Your "standard" user must be someone with Full Accounting Rights, not just a standard user.  I do not see any user-defined behaviour in the setting, it is for the system once set and affects all users the same.

Bernie Lundberg said:

Is there any documentation available on the format of the CSV files?

There is no overt documentation that I know of, however the purpose of the schema.ini file is to store the file formats.  You can either look through it or open the 32-bit ODBC Data Source Administrator (after printing a form), and go through the Sage 50 CSV for Crystal Reports Configuration to look at the Defined format for each file.

Bernie Lundberg said:

produce inventory documentation

I'm not sure exactly what you are after here but I don't think you will get what you want from the csv files.  While there are file formats in the schema.ini that are related to inventory eg. inventry.csv, the report that uses that csv file was removed from the program several years ago.  Therefore there is no way to trigger the creation of the report.

You might be better off seeing if one of the MS Office Document reports will work for you or maybe create a combined report by exporting several inventory-related reports and using the template to combine the information using Excel formulas.

You are 100% correct. My user login does have full accounting right. I checked with a different account that does not have full rights and the check box is greyed out. 

Thanks for the great tip on the schema.ini file. I didn't even look at it. Looks like it lays out the format of every CSV file. I have also never used the ODBC Data Source Administrator before. This is a great way to view the files. 

I chose poor wording when I said inventory documentation. We are intending to use the client order CSV files to produce a form that goes in the box of parts with our techs to site. The INVITEM csv looks like it has all the items on the client order which is the information that we need. This data will be used to populate a document produced in excel that the techs use to mark what they used and what is being returned. This is cross checked by the shipper receiver to reduce inventory errors.

I am not familiar with the MS Office Document reports. I briefly looked at them a while ago but was getting compile errors every time I tried to open a report and have not looked at them since. Any information you may have on using the MS Office reports would be appreciated. If they fit into our business structure, I should review getting the errors corrected.

You might be getting compile errors if you are using the 64-bit version of Excel.  The whole system is built for 32-bit.

You could save yourself some trouble by just creating an sfm template to use as the Order that will show only the line items and no dollars and call it a Picking Slip.

If the user that prints it needs to also print an order, then name the files similarly like CompanyOrder.sfm and CompanyOrderPS.sfm and then the user just needs to add or remove the PS to change templates.

Yes we are running 64-bit excel. 

The sfm templates don't work for our purposes as we enter other information into the electronic copy of the document that is external to Sage 50. We may be able to eliminate this process if Sage 50 were structured with a work order system that could tie supplier orders and client orders to a job number or work order number. We are currently looking for a different business solution that is more suited to our operations, so this is more of a stop gap in the meantime.