Two Questions

Can I take the xml and excel files from my home server and port them to a hosting server?  If so I do I do this I do not see an import for the xml files which are the categories and I feel I need to start with them.

Thank you
LadyDee

can you explain in more detail what you are trying to do - i maybe misunderstanding but are you talking about moving your site from your test machine to a hosted environment? if so then you will simply be copying the database from your own machine to your hosted machine - all categories,products, topics, settings etc will be copied in one process.

yes for XML file there is no option to IMPORT, you can only EXPORT in nopCommerce
Talking about EXCEL FILE , you can IMPORT your data easily in nopCommerce database thru excel file (only compulsion is the data in excel file needs to be in specific format defined by nopCommerce structure)

Hope it helps