Quickfill Issues

[Wayne Bird]

Hello Derek,

Let me begin with saying you guys are doing an awesome job with Gnucash!  

>Sure, remove (or re-label) the transactions that have the "spurious"
> description.
> If you want to remove the "TACO BELL" from the quickfill then you need
> to go edit every transaction that has "TACO BELL" and change it to "Taco
> Bell".

The problem with the above is that the next time I do an import I'll have all caps again.

Is there a way to globally change the Payee (Description in the case of Gnucash), rather than going into every single transaction?  If I can access a list of all the Payees and change it there and that will change all the transactions, this would be acceptable.  Right now I'm taking way too long having to re-enter data.  However, if I didn't have MSMoney, and haven't been using it for over 15 years, I would definitely be using Gnucash.  Again, you guys are doing a great job and Gnucash is a great program.

In reports, is there a way to have the negative values be shown in red?  Currently they are black and in parentheses.  The parentheses are fine, but having them show in read will help them stand out even more.

Speaking of reports, I tried to figure out how I can have or create a report that searches all my transactions for a particular payee, a particular account and gives me the total amount spent.  For example, I want to know how much I've spent at Wal-Mart for food items.  I have all my food transactions in an account called Food: Groceries.  I know I can open my Food: Groceries account and do a search on Wal-Mart and this will bring up all the correct transactions, but it doesn't give me the total.  Many of my Food... transactions are also in a split so it would be nice to have Gnucash not show all the other items in the split, only the ones that you did the report on.

Also, in 2.2.9, one of my bank downloads, a .qif file, will not import.  It gives me the error, "Transaction amount: Unrecognized or inconsistent format."  If I export the data in .csv format, open it in OpenOffice and convert to .qif using calc2qif macro, then import into Gnucash, everything works fine.  First, I understand that this problem sounds like my bank's problem and not Gnucash; other .qif imports from other institutions import into Gnucash without a problem.  Second, because I already have MSMoney that imports this .qif perfectly fine, I'll just continue using MSMoney.  Third, if I didn't have MSMoney, these extra steps are nothing compared to having to enter all the transactions manually.  Fourth, 2.3.5 does import the exact same .qif file that 2.2.9 choked on.  I uninstalled 2.3.5 because I found out after installing it that it was still in beta.  Since I'm completely new to Gnucash, I didn't want to spend too much time entering all my data in that version.

I also do all my financial tracking and planning using the "envelope" method.  MSMoney wasn't developed with this method in mind, but I have successfully figured out how to use it in this way.  I was also trying to use Gnucash in this way.  What are your thoughts and comments concerning Gnucash and the "envelope" method of financial planning?  I'm looking forward to your thoughts on this.

Anyways, I'll continue using MSMoney, but will keep a very watchful eye on Gnucash!

Thanks Derek for a great open source program, keep up the good work!

Wayne


> To: sunfish62 at yahoo.com
> CC: dbreiser at earthlink.net; wrbird at hotmail.com; gnucash-user at gnucash.org
> Subject: Re: Quickfill Issues
> From: warlord at MIT.EDU
> Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:07:18 -0400
> 
> "David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> > It seems to me the real problem here is that the Quickfill database is
> > adding the descriptions of imported transactions automatically.
> 
> The QuickFill doesn't care about how a transaction was entered.  There
> is no memory that a transaction was entered by hand vs. entered via an
> import.  In the end they are all just transactions.  The quickfill
> system just takes all the transaction descriptions and puts them into a
> list.
> 
> If you want to remove the "TACO BELL" from the quickfill then you need
> to go edit every transaction that has "TACO BELL" and change it to "Taco
> Bell".
> 
> > It really defeats the purpose of Quickfill to have spurious entries
> > that force the user to fully type in the description a second time
> > with an extra character at the end that you then have to delete
> > out. There's not much that's "Quick" about that. It is quite
> > frustrating to import a slew of transactions in 3 minutes, only to
> > spend a half an hour re-typing the transactions in human case (with an
> > extra character added).
> 
> It's not spurious at all!  The user has a transaction in the database
> with the description of "TACO BELL", so GnuCash is being helpful.  How
> is it supposed to know that you consider it "Spurious"?
> 
> > Is there any way to change this behavior? Perhaps at least an option
> > to remove spurious entries from the list once they're there (something
> > like Firefox's editable address bar dropdown)?
> 
> Sure, remove (or re-label) the transactions that have the "spurious"
> description.
> 
> > David
> 
> > Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> > You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
> 
> -derek
> 
> -- 
>        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>        Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>        URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>        warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available

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