Irritating

[Derek Atkins]

Terry Boldt <tboldt at attglobal.net> writes:

> I have now been using gnucash 1.6.8 on RH 8.0 for several months and have two 
> idiosyncacies that are really irritating. I don't know if the newer gnucash 
> "fixes" these problems or not. I have been relunctant to upgrade due to 
> trouble I had in getting 1.6.8 to compile and do not know what libraries will 
> have to change if I try the newer version.

If you can compile 1.6, then you can compile 1.8.  The _ONLY_ changed
dependency is g-wrap; you need g-wrap-1.3.4 for gnucash-1.8, whereas
you need g-wrap-1.2.x or 1.1.11 for gnucash-1.6.  Other than that, there
are no new dependencies.

All my answers below are with respect to 1.8.  You should upgrade.

> Anyway, the two things that I find really irritating after some use:
> 
> 1. in reconciling an account, I open the reconcile dialog and expect the 
> current date or at least some reasonable date to be the default. What I find 
> is that the date that the dialog defaults to seems to be choosen totally at 
> random. sometimes it is anywhere from today's date to a month in the future. 
> Sometimes just the reverse, up to a month in the past. I recently reconciled 
> one account and the date posted when the dialog opened was 3 months in the 
> past. This is irritating because then not only the date must be changed, but 
> also the balance figure. I have tried to determine whether there is a pattern 
> to the date choosen and have been unable to discern a pattern. It appears the 
> date is choosen totally at random. Instead of trying to get really 
> intelligent in choosing the date, why not just use the current date? If I'm 
> reconciling an account, I rarely, if ever, reconcile an account for sometime 
> in the futre or for a date 3 months in the past. 99% of the time it is for 
> today's balance from the statement I just downloaded from the financial 
> institution.

I know that this has been worked on..  The reconcile dialog tries to
choose a reasonable reconciliation date based on the last two
reconciliation dates.  It basically intuits the reconciliation
interval and then defaults to that.  So, if you always reconcile at
the end of the month, after two months it should always "guess" the
end of the month, one month at a time.

Note that reconciliation is supposed to be for PRINTED,
end-of-the-month statements.  It is _NOT_ supposed to be a "this is
what the bank says today" process.  If you're just looking at your
list of transactions from your financial institution, you're obtaining
the list of cleared transactions.  That is NOT reconciliation.  If you
want to mark the transactions that have cleared your finanacial
institution, you should 'clear' the transactions in the register
window by clicking on the RECN column and change the 'n' to a 'c'.

> 2. When creating a new transaction in the register window of an account, the 
> auto-complete function will complete the "description" field, normally the 
> first field (after the date field if not for today) that I complete. This is 
> great, but then the auto-complete function goes even further. As soon as I 
> change to another field for the new transaction, the auto-complete function 
> picks a transaction from the past in the register and completes the remaining 
> fields. Again I have been unable to determine which past transaction is 
> duplicated. sometimes it is the last transaction for the particular matching 
> for the "description" field, sometimes it skips back a few transactions for 
> that "description" and picks a transaction. Sometimes it doesn't complete the 

This has been fixed; it should complete the most recent transaction
that matches the description.

> transaction at all. Sometimes it will swap the amounts in the deposits and 
> withdrawl column (for a checking account for example), i.e., it will take the 
> amount in the deposit column and put it into the withdrawl column and vice 
> versa.  I assume that the assumption being that the next transaction is 
> supposed to "pay-off" the prior transaction. This action again seems to be 
> random. The action in completing the transaction would be great if all of my 
> transactions for all transactions for a given "description" field were the 
> same (e.g., monthly mortgage payments, etc.), but this is not the case. They 
> are all unique. Invariably my "work" in creating the transaction is doubled, 
> because I must now change all of the fields automatically created. I have 
> looked in vain through the preferences dialogs for a way to turn this feature 
> off (and retain the ability to complete fields based on my input). If the 
> ability to turn off this feature is there, it is well hidden from my view.

I do not believe that you cannot turn off autocompletion.

> Again, if these "features" have been changed/fixed in the lastest version, 
> accept my apologiers for raising the issue here.

Accepted.

> Another question, does anybody have experience in compiling the latest stable 
> version under RH 8.0 and which libraries/packages need to be updated? If so, 
> please update the mailing list so that I can attempt the update.

Um, there are pre-compiled RPMs already available for RH8.  You can
find them at http://www.gnucash.org/pub/ As I implied earlier, you
will need not only the Gnucash RPM but also an updated g-wrap RPM.
Make sure you pull down the RH8 RPMs.

-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