Reports again

[James Wilde]

I've been extremely critical of the reporting ability of GC in recent posts, and a remark I noticed in one reply set me thinking.  I decided to take GC home to mother, as it were, and take a look at it in its home environment under linux.  I have Virtualbox on my Mac, and I have a copy of Ubuntu 11.04 running there, so I loaded GC from the Ubuntu repository and loaded over my data from the Mac.

Lo and behold, everything worked.  I could get rid of the hyperlinks, I could change the font, it recognised my mixed locale (language English, almost everything else  sv_SE.UTF-8) and it produced a perfect report, both on screen and as an html file.  Importing the html file into LibreOffice Calc worked - almost - perfectly, and the value columns were values and not text strings.  The hang-up concerned the translation of the Swedish letters å, ä and ö (and their higher face equivalents, which I didn't test), and this is an issue I must take up with LibreOffice, not GC.  It seems that LibO uses a slightly different coding for these letters.  In GC and the html report file, å is represented as C3A5.  In LibO it is represented as C383C2A5 and comes out as two characters.  Similarly with the other Swedish letters.

I've never worked with GC in Windows, but a copy is on my wife's Windows box, and I just fired it up.  Same thing, more or less.  The links disappear, the font could be changed, and it snapped up the locale on her machine (don't know off-hand, but I believe that, too, is mixed) and produced a perfect report.  Exporting the report to html and importing into Excel worked perfectly, even including the Swedish letters.  I tried importing into LibO Calc, and that worked perfectly also, including the Swedish letters.

So I apologise for all my harsh comments, which many of the developers, those who work under linux and Windows, may have found difficult to comprehend.  GC is not only the best accounting package for inputting data, as I've always maintained, it's also good at exporting data - under these two operating systems.  And that makes it by far the best accounting package on all fronts.  (Just add a chart of accounts, and it'll be perfect.)

However, that still leaves the Cinderella, or maybe the ugly ducking, amongst operating systems.  On the Mac, reporting and exporting data sucks.  I think it might be worth putting in the wiki that GC for the Mac is an early alpha version, with the recommendation that Mac owners run it in a virtual linux machine.  Or give their data file to a colleague running linux or Windows for printing.

Thanks for a great product.

//James