changing a large number of transactions in a batch -- impossible?

[David T.]

Anna--

Derek's points are all accurate. 


My experience has been that changing a subset of a register's transactions--even a large subset--can be handled pretty quickly with just a few tricks. 


First, open the register with the erroneous transactions in it, and set the view to Transaction Journal view. Next, get to the split of a transaction you want to change, and change it. Before leaving the field, highlight the full account information (for example, "Expenses:Business:New Account") and copy it. Now, press "Enter", and because of how Gnucash works, the transaction will "disappear" from the current register. (Actually, the transaction isn't gone, it's just been moved to the new account register. Since you changed the split line that anchored the transaction to the current register, it goes away from this one.) Go to the next transaction you want to move, highlight the current account split line, and paste in the account information. Pressing enter will disappear this transaction as well. Repeat for each transaction you want to move, and before you know it, you'll be done.

HTH,
David



________________________________
 From: Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU>
To: gnucash-user at lists.gnucash.org 
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012 6:34 AM
Subject: Re: changing a large number of transactions in a batch -- impossible?
 
Hi,

"Anna's unattended mail" <anna.morris-1okt59qe at cool.fr.nf> writes:

> There does not seem to be a way to select many transactions, and do
> something like delete them, change the description, or move them to
> another account.  Is gnucash really limited to working on one
> transaction at a time?  So if a user wants to move 100 transactions
> from account A to account B, the gnucash way is to tediously do ~3-4
> clicks on each row (since there are no keyboard shortcuts either).  Is
> that correct?

Yes, you can in general only operate on a single transaction at once.

> What are the options here?  What about exporting an account to another
> software tool (Ledger-cli?), performing the batch operation there, and
> then importing the new accounts?  Has anyone tried this?

I did say "in general", there are some cases where you can operate on
multiple transactions at once.  The importer, for one.  The QIF
importer, specifically, operates on meta data so multiple transactions
with the same metadata can all be assigned the same target.

Moreover, if you want to move *all* the transactions from one account
into another you can delete that account and gnucash will ask you where
you want to move the transactions.

Other than that, however, you are limited to only doing one at a time.

You can *try* modifying the datafile out from under GnuCash, but this is
neither recommended nor supported.  Be sure to backup your data before
you attempt that.

> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.

-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
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