it's that dang importer module

Hey ubercartersza!
Well i have been going through the standard learning curve of drupal and ubercart....
you know tears of frustration, manic laughter and whooping at sucsess and occasional hair pulling.But an exciting adventure none the less on the path from n00b to baffled.
So now i am attempting to get the import mod working.
i have installed the import module and the patch (i think) discovered what parsing a csv and xml is (kind of) but have the following ignorant issues.(also import node and node names)have read every string dating back to early '06 came across a little bit of insite at big robots site Eye-wink but still no real understanding
To create the xml do i just make columns in a spreadsheet with the name,category,sku etc as the column header and then export as csv to import into uber?( i did have a look at the xml file you posted but it is gobbledegeek to me and as my weekend past in a flash but with out the epiphany that normally comes from bashing my neurons against the ubercart wall for 24 hours i have been reduced to beg for enlightenment!
The other issue is that on trying to export product i am faced with the dred white screen!So i cannot check what uber is trying to export and work backwards as suggested in one of Lyle's posts.
I have searched high and low for an understandable explanation but to no avail.

I am using a 5.9 drup install on a bitnami stack
yours in ignorance
maaak

(sometimes things need to be believed before they are seen)