Martin, Thanks for the detailed instructions, I will give them a try as soon as I can.

Yeah! I'd like to know if I've skipped anything important. Please advise me of any confusions, ambiguities or lapses.

Were you successful?

I used excel rather than googledocs so the process was slightly different, however your explanation gave me an understanding of the concept. The import created the contacts within the company and as a separate contact also, notes came in with the contact as well. Unfortunately, I made a mistake when matching the contact to the company (sort function issue) and about half way through the list the contacts ended up miss assigned, so i will be doing it again.

But again the concept was sound and exactly what I need thanks so much for your help and fast response.

This is great news. I'm glad I was able to help.

@Martin UPDATE...the import worked to get all the contacts in but the only user that can access them is the admin (it is also the only user that existed at the time of the import). I thought is was a bug problem and so I loaded the fix but it didn't make any difference. When I install new users they cannot access the imported companies or contacts, but any new companies or contacts that are installed can be accessed by the other users regardless of who created them. Any Suggestions???

I see you have removed the check mark that accepted my answer, even though I did fully answer the question you asked. You even said "I have imported successfully imported companies via csv". Were they successfully imported or not? You now say that, "When I install new users they cannot access the imported companies or contacts." This is a new problem, unrelated to the one I answered thoroughly and correctly. You should consider asking for help with an entirely new question, leaving this one marked as having been correctly answered.

I have rechecked the answer as accepted, my thought was that if imported information can not be accessed it wasn't successfully imported. I created a fresh data base did a first level import (just the company not the related contact) and could not access the company list with a created user so there must be another issue. I have created another question to address it.

Thank you. I appreciate your quick response. The new problem is strange and worrying, since I am busy with much the same work myself right now.

I had managed to get all my contacts imported through csv without specifying a company (since I couldn't get it to recognise them), thought I could just assign a company to the contacts later. But when I started doing that in OpenERP, as soon as I assigned a company to a contact, all their info except their name disappeared! Anyone know how to prevent that from happening?

UPDATE: @Martin; @ Bob .I have discovered what might have been a "duh" to many, particularly our European users. There are two different "Companies" in OpenERP. The Company you can see when signed in with full admin privileges that you see under settings is the "Your Company". Since OpenERP supports multi-companies you create multiple Owned or "Your Companies". If you use settings/companies/import the system assumes these are all "Your Companies" so only users with access would see them. The companies (customer companies) I was wanting to import should be imported through (see below)

(cont. from above) imported through Sales/Customers/Import, then you can follow the above answer and other users will be able to see. Remember that you must have the User can Import/Export box checked in General Settings and when you are at Sales/Customers you must be in list view or you can't see the import button. Also when you import the Companies you must have a column "Is a Company" and the field must be marked TRUE.

Which field (when using the import wizard ) is being matched to the 'parent_id/id' field in the csv file? I've tried 'Related Company" and others like it but keep getting vakudatuib errors, or worse, a red error with no reason why its failed validation. Can anyone assist?

Will this work on Odoo 12?