Reports in Gnucash 2.4

[Colin Scott]

> Exporting data from Gnucash to Excel seems to be a recurrent task 
> for a lot of people.
>
> Would it be so hard to create a feature to export data directly in
> CSV format?

Excel is a wonderful tool, and in the absence of a proper user-level report-writer (which, I suspect, is at least in part because the data schema, having grown up as gnucash has developed, is pretty impenetrable!) it is about the only readily accessible method available to the typical gnucash end-user to amend, enhance and re-format gnucash reports beyond the straightjacket imposed by the reporting system.

So, we work with what we have!  The problem is not really the physical task of exporting a report - that is pretty simple, whether by cut-and-paste (which I use because it seems simplest), or by exporting the report as HTML and importing the HTML into Excel.  Either way, the results are pretty much identical.

The problems that are arise are generally caused, as in this case, by gratuitous changes to the report output format (which is entirely outside the control of the average gnucash user, being embedded in the low-level systems that create reports).  And a facility to export in .CSV format would be just as susceptible to such changes as the current forms of export.

Colin