This word came into use in the mid eighties. Like export, it usually now implies the movement of data into an application, most frequently data which is in another format and which has to be translated by the receiving application. So a user may add new r

This word came into use in the mid eighties. Like export, it usually now implies the movement of data into an application, most frequently data which is in another format and which has to be translated by the receiving application. So a user may add new records to a database by importing them from a source file which may be text or may be in the format of another database; a desktop-publishing system may import text and graphic files in a variety of formats and convert them to its internal representation.