PayPal’s tab-delimited history format is busted
by ZetaGecko | 1 Comment | Issues/Problems
Wow, they still haven't figured this out... Same problem as last year: when you download your transaction history from PayPal in tab-delimited format, each value is enclosed in quotes. That's correct for comma delimited files, but tab delimited files are supposed to just have tabs between the data items with no added quote marks. So to import these files into my spreadsheet software, I have to run the whole file through a script that gets rid of the quote marks.
One more thing while I'm here--the history download form itself is a bit busted--specifically the sizes of the date fields. The month and day fields are wide enough to show three characters at a time. No problem there--just a little extra space. The problem is that the year field is also only three characters wide. So if you want to change "2006" to "2005" (which I do), you first have to navigate to the digit that isn't initially visible and delete it. Did the person who designed that form never use it?
April 5th, 2006 at 11:48 am
Two more things:
1) It would be nice if they had a drop down list of quarters or months to make it easy to select specific periods.
2) Apparently, downloading your transaction history doesn't keep your session active, because I've found myself logged out a few times immediately after the download. If the download happened faster, that wouldn't be a big dea, but ... it doesn't.