Quickbooks and Quickbooks Online both offer the option to export reports to Microsoft Excel. You can choose a range of dates, specify every column in sight, then it all magically appears in Excel all nicely formatted and ready to print. What could be better?

Well, I’m not sure why anyone would export to Excel just to print, when they can already print directly from Quickbooks. Also, don’t try exporting too many records or it won’t complete.

Despite all appearances that Quickbooks makes it very easy to export data, Intuit has always managed to cripple the process just enough to make for a frustrating and often fruitless experience for all but the most basic exports. It has always seemed to me like their goal is for your data to be trapped within Quickbooks, so that they don’t have to fear you switching so easily to another competing (and hopefully more open) product.

When my years of frustration finally got the best of me, I decided that a solution must be developed. OutUvIt is in the form of an Excel addin that prompts for the selection of one or many Quickbooks exports, strips from them the garbage-that-Intuit-includes-to-make-it-look-useful-but-actually-render-it-nearly-useless (headers/page breaks/blank columns/total rows), and merges them into a very useful Excel table (ListObject in VBA) that can be easily sorted, filtered, totaled, or imported into a database. OutUvIt can even identify and remedy transactions that are duplicated across multiple exports.

For those cases where it is necessary to repeatedly import from Quickbooks, OutUvIt allows filename masks pointing to the Quickbooks export files to be saved to allow automation of the import process from a growing selection of files within a specific folder.

Arrivederci, Intuit.