New Account Dialog

[John Ralls]

> On Jul 27, 2016, at 10:01 AM, Alex Aycinena <alex.aycinena at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 9:00 AM, <gnucash-devel-request at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> From: "David T." <sunfish62 at yahoo.com>
>> To: GnuCash-Devel <gnucash-devel at gnucash.org>
>> Cc:
>> Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2016 11:25:11 +0500
>> Subject: New Account Dialog
>> Hello,
>> 
>> In recent weeks, there have been a number of threads on the user list in
>> which users have had difficulties setting up accounts for equities and
>> mutual funds. These users have not been able to set the Security/Currency
>> to an appropriate value because the account type was not correctly set.
>> 
>> I believe that the New Account dialog contributes to this problem by the
>> way it is set up. The sequence of fields in the dialog does not match the
>> required sequence of input; the user must correctly set the Account Type
>> field (located at the bottom of the dialog) *BEFORE* they can correctly set
>> the Security/currency field.
>> 
>> Not only is this sequence confusing to new users, it is an annoyance for
>> experienced users as well, since the user must manually relocate to the
>> type field, set the type, and then manually relocate back to the currency
>> field to set it. This quickly gets burdensome.
>> 
>> At the very least, I would suggest that it would be much clearer and
>> easier to all users to have the Account Type field placed immediately after
>> the Description field, and that it be changed to a drop down list. This
>> would make it clearer to new users and more efficient for others, without
>> entailing a great deal of change to the program.
>> 
>> I can add a bug to bugzilla if it seems that this would be useful.
>> 
>> David
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> David,
>> 
>> I think that that's quite well explained in Chapter 8 of the guide, and
>> the new user's problems are largely down to not reading the documentation
>> before diving in.
>> 
>> I agree with to your proposed change to the UI for 2.8, and it should be
>> as you say fairly simple, probably only a Glade change with no code. Please
>> do file a bug so that we remember to do it.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Ralls
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> I am currently doing some work that will change the Account dialog for
> other reasons. If everyone is in agreement, I can change the layout as
> David suggests in the course of that work. I would probably commit that to
> master in a few weeks.

Alex,

That would be great, thanks!

Regards,
John Ralls