Suggestion for making account selection in splits

[Colin Law]

On 19 January 2013 15:12, trythis <grahamlane at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am looking for a better way to apply accounts to transactions. Please offer
> suggestions.
> Right now, I have a lot of account and some have 30 sub accounts with sub
> accounts in the 30 to 50 range.
> I have my accounts broken up like this to make keying the account names
> easier:
> AB Assets business
> AP Assets Personal
> EB Expense Business
> EP Expense Personal
> E Equity
> IB Income Business
> IP Income Personal
> LB...
> LP....you get the idea.
>
> Selecting accounts to apply to transactions in split mode is darn slow and
> quite tedious especially when doing two or three months at a time.
>
> I am wondering if you can share some tricks that can make this easier
> besides memorizing a thousand numerical account codes. The drop down menu
> requires a lot of keyboard activity, which I have shortened to, for example:
> "AB [end key] (now its either lots of up/down arrow action or hope I
> remember the accounts name by just typing it in).
> You just cant see enough with the drop down menu to make this quick.

I type : rather than end key and I see a full screen height window
showing the accounts.  Do you not see this?  One can then type the
first characters of the sub account and then : again to get to sub sub
accounts if necessary.  In addition one can use the mouse wheel to
scroll the list.   I could see an improvement in that the one
initially selected (AB in this case) is in the middle whereas in
practice the one you are looking for is always below this, so it would
make more sense for the selected one to be near the top.

>
> I think it would be fantastic if you could click a little button that would
> pop up a full account page and when you click on the account you want or a
> check box and [Okay] button it gets applied. Multiple boxes would create
> additional splits automatically in the register. Wish I was a programmer
> sometimes.

I don't see what advantage a pop up account page would have over a
full screen selection menu, though I suppose the ability to collapse
the account heirarchy might be useful.

Colin