Custom Reports

[Geert Janssens]

On Monday 16 August 2010, Colin Scott wrote:
> > How do I delete the first "Chart of Accounts" custom report, or
> > permanently edit the custom report?
> 
> The short answer is you can't.
> 
> The slightly longer answer is that you need to make your changes, and
> then save the report with a new name - eg, "Chart of Accounts (V2)" - and
> then work from there.  However, you cannot actually remove any name once
> it is in there.  And beware - you will often find that your new report
> appears with the same name as its predecessor rather than the new one, so
> you will end up with two entries in the list with the same name.
> 
> You, as so many, have stumbled on the single biggest weakness in the
> reporting system, if not of gnucash itself.  All of this has been known
> since I started using gnucash well over a year ago, but apparently it is
> considered a lower priority than adding new features.
> 
Inf fact this has been improved in the latest unstable series and the 
improvements will be in the upcoming 2.4 release.

The changes include a dialog box to manage your custom reports. That is you 
can delete them via this dialog. Combined with the existing functionality of 
creating custom reports, you will have to tools to:
* create a custom report and save it for future use
* modify the settings of a custom report/save it as a new report
* delete the old custom report

In addition, the issue of duplicate names in the menus has been resolved as 
well.

I won't say this is the perfect setup, but at least an important improvement 
already.

And of course, 2.4 is not out just yet. It's close to being released, but the 
devs are currently trying to iron out the last blocking bugs.

> If it sounds churlish to criticise a free product so roundly, then so be
> it - although I make these remarks more in sorrow than in anger.  However,
> I find it hard to understand the priorities of the team (who have
> otherwise produced a remarkable, and remarkably useful, product) to leave
> untouched such glaringly awful design - let alone the glaring bugs
> therein! -  whilst adding features that whilst possibly nice do not have
> nearly the same impact on the product's overall utility.
> 
Thank you for your concern here.

Perhaps you will be glad to hear that 2.4 includes several improvements in the 
report area. The major change in the reporting area is the introduction of 
webkit as the new rendering engine for reports. For this release webkit will 
introduce only little the user visible changes, but it's an important 
milestone to allow better reports in the future.
Other than that, I already mentioned the new custom reports interface and 
fixing the duplicate naming issue.

Geert