The manuals that come with many computer programs leave you with the impression that transferring data from one application to another is amazingly simple — but it's not. Programs from different software companies might be able to "talk" to each other, but only if the data is set up exactly the way each program expects. I experienced this problem firsthand when trying to automate the chore of manually entering budgets into QuickBooks (for job costing) from a printout of my WinEst estimate. Enter my trusty spreadsheet, which I used to create a conduit between the other two programs. I use Borland Quattro Pro as my spreadsheet, but Microsoft Excel or Lotus 1-2-3 will do the same job. The only
