Gnucash 1.8.2 first impressions

[Derek Atkins]

"Salkind, Lou" <Lou-Salkind at deshaw.com> writes:

> > Pricedb entries are never created by anything except the 
> > Transfer Dialog, Manual Entry in the Price Editor, and 
> > pulling quotes off the net.  I'm not convinced that the QIF 
> > importer (or any importer) should actually add items to the 
> > pricedb -- but I could be convinced.
> 
> Here are my arguments:  (1) If the prices are not entered by the
> importer, I doubt anybody without a fair amount of experience will be
> able to track down why the two programs are giving different numbers.
> (2) The fact that the price histories exist means that somebody
> previously entered them and needed them, so why wouldn't you want them
> in the pricedb?

That's a completely different issue.  I'm talking about entering in
pricedb entries from transactions; not "reading historical prices from
a Quicken datafile".  The latter cannot happen because the data format
is not defined (or if it IS defined the importer has no clue how to
even read it).

Second, all you need to do is run a single automated quote download
and your system will be up and running.

> > I think this depends on your font.  For example, it works 
> > fine for me. Note that you can also resize the register columns.
> 
> Quite possible, as I do have some additional true type fonts in my font
> path.  But shouldn't the software automatically take the font width into
> account when sizing the columns?  To be fair, I am getting a few
> warnings about missing font characters on stderr.

It could be, but this is just a problem with gnome-1 in general.  When
gnucash moves to gnome2 hopefully a lot of these issues will go away.

> I'll try this, but nevertheless, I think the scrollbar should disappear
> once the window is made wide enough.  The current behavior just keeps
> expanding some of the columns to fill up whatever horizontal space I
> give it.  This would be OK except for the fact that it seems to allocate
> space for the columns PLUS a few pixels, which means there is always a
> scroll bar present (although it doesn't scroll very far).

Well, feel free to file an RFE if you think the scrollbar should go
away, but the scrollbar is always there....

> > Uh, what version of Gnucash are you using?  I thought this 
> > was fixed in 1.8.2, but perhaps it was one of those patches 
> > that were applied after 1.8.2 and will be fixed in 1.8.3....
> 
> It says 1.8.2 on the startup, and the binaries were downloaded from the
> web site 1.8.2 distribution.

Then perhaps I applied this patch after 1.8.2 was released...  Hmm,
looking at the ChangeLog it appears I am confused; I applied a patch
to increase the size of the account hierarchy druid, but not the
new-account dialog..

> I might as well add to the wish list a Quicken portfolio feature I found
> helpful:  being able to value the portfolio (or asset) as of a given
> day.  Very useful when bringing records up to date and debugging any
> data entry problems.  Perhaps there is a way to do this already?

It's very easy to do it "as of today" by pulling down current prices
and turning on the "display in report currency" column in the account
tree.  I don't know if there is a way to do it as of a specific date.

-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