Multi currency discussion cont'd

Christian Stimming stimming@tuhh.de
Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:35:53 +0100


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On Montag, 30. Dezember 2002 15:57, Jan Nielsen wrote:
> I have been testing some of the multi currency functionality introduced
> in gnucash after my initial observations about a month back.

Very good. Please continue to do so, and report any unexpected behaviour 
and/or bugs. We really depend on user feedback. Thanks a lot.

As for your detailed points: If you encounter one specific problem, please 
think about whether you can file a bugzilla bug report 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=GnuCash . Or maybe this 
problem has already been reported in bugzilla -- then you can add more 
comments to the existing report. Bugzilla really helps the developers to keep 
track of what still needs to be dealt with.

> 1) When specifying a transfer between two differently "currencied"
> accounts using the "To amount" mechanism I expected that it would be
> possible to go back and adjust one of the the sides independently of the
> other. 

I totally agree. Part of it is already solved since the "Edit Exchange Rate" 
dialog opens automatically. Part of this is definitely a bug as reported in 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102161 . If you have any further 
observations to add, please comment on the bug in bugzilla.

> 2) When making a transfer between two differently currencied accounts
> from the ledger gnucash apparently automatically finds some old exchange
> rate . IMHO
> it should at least be possible to configure a preference that a)
> automatically brings up the transfer dialog identical to the toolbar
> transfer button when making a transfer between two accounts with
> different currencies 

When I last tested (with CVS from December 29), I automatically got exactly 
that transfer dialog. Note that the behaviour in the register is strongly 
dependent on the current view mode. This of course shouldn't be the case in 
the final stable version, but we're not there yet. So if you saw some 
unexpected behaviour, please describe how you got there as detailed as 
possible (e.g. whether you typed Enter or Tab, which view mode you used, and 
so on).

> 3) Reports:
>
> Account summary: All accounts are listed but with $0.00 as balance. I
> have my currency preference set to EUR and use locale C and I do not
> have a single $ entry in my data.

@§%$!! This has been asked a zillion times before. The "Default currency" 
preference should be called "Default currency for new accounts", *not* 
default currency for reports. The default currency for reports follows the 
locale. I.e., if you run LANG=C, you get USD as default currency, whereas if 
you run e.g. LANG=de_DE, you get EUR as default currency. 

I've changed the name of this option now. It is now called "New Account 
Default Currency".

Pretty much all of your problems with reports and "empty data" will probably 
be resolved if you manually choose another report currency.

> select "Edit report options" I get a) for expense accounts: "Badly
> formed options URL: report-id50" 

Yes, I've seen that, too. That's a bug and I have no idea about that as well. 
Please file it in bugzilla.

> The top left pane which says:
>
> "Welcome to GnuCash 1.8!
> GnuCash 1.8 has lots of nice features. Here are a few.
>
> Edit Options   Single Report"
>
> seems particulary useless to me. In general this report suffers from
> layout problems. The reports should be a easy to understand overview,
> but it is very messy. 

Totally agreed. Please feel free to submit an improved layout suggestion.

> The pie charts are about 2 mm in diameter and the legend is so big that they
> take up all the available space. The top left space is completely unused.

The pie charts (and all graphical reports) have the problem that we cannot 
determine the font size in advance, and we also cannot know the length of the 
account names in advance. So we had to make reasonable guesses about what the 
space requirements for the legend are, and then chose a pie chart size big 
enough so that a resonable pie chart shows up. Obviously this didn't work out 
in your case. Again, please feel free to suggest improved size parameters 
here.

> "Sample and Custom: Custom Multicolumn View" shows up as a completely
>  blank page. Again the name is unfortunate, and the fact that it does
> not do anything just makes it worse ;-)

Did you (finally) understand what it does (in its option dialog)? If yes, what 
name would you suggest for that report? What other behaviour would you expect 
from that kind of report framework?

> "Sample and Custom: Custom Web Report" gets the gnucash.org homepage.
> But  either this report should have a different name (such as
> "GnuCash.org Homepage") or it should be removed. Most users expect
> gnucash be a financial program and not a web browser.

Interesting point. 

> "Sample and Custom: Sample report with examples" probably makes a nice
> example for somebody who actually understands these things, but for a
> program that is getting ready for end-users it is a "must-disappear
> thing". If such an example must be included I would suggest a special
> "extend gnucash" menu somewhere where most users never arrive.

Agreed. I'd suggest you file a bug report on that.

> "Income and expense: profits and loss": 
[and all other reports]
> Again here I think the default currency should follow
> the user preference. 

Explained above, and also in http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87729

> Particularly as there is no way of changing it.

In the tool bar, click on "Options".

Christian
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