Saving Report Formats

[Ian Konen]

Cat, I think your answer was spot on...I don't think Wes was trying to
change a built in report as much as he just wants to not have to make the
same changes to the same options each time he runs it.

Wes, .I don't think there's a way you can make an already generated report
update automatically when transactions are added*, but once you've created
a custom report it's as easy to run as a built-in, and it records the
options you've selected.  I found this link a pretty good walk-through of
the process when I couldn't find it in the GnuCash help, although it's a
little out of date (there's no Save icon as described in step six...at
least in 2.4.13; it's File->Add Report, and as Cat said, you cannot
overwrite the original version of the report (the File-Add Report doesn't
show up until you change the report name in the options)

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/doityourself-it-guy/diy-create-custom-reports-in-gnucash/

Note that for the date range, the options on the right include start/end
this/previous month, which I haven't personally used but seem intended
precisely for this use, as opposed to saving explicit dates from e.g.
06/01/13 to 06/30/13.  The latter will keep generating June's report no
matter when you run it.

*I realized that's not quite accurate...report tabs that are left open when
you close or quit are re-run when you open the GnuCash file, and they will
preserve the options you selected.  They're also re-run when you change an
option that would require checking through the account data again, so you
could just leave one tab open and get an up-to-date monthly for any month
by editing explicit date range (and this would include any newly added
transactions if they're in the date range).  It seems like you would have
done that at some point between months, so maybe all you really did need to
find was the variable date options.  Oh well, I'd recommend a Custom Report
that generates a monthly cash flow: you may find that waiting for GnuCash
to re-run a bunch of open report tabs everytime you launch even more
annoying than having to re-select options because some of them (like Cash
Flow) can take quite a while to generate.  I usually close all my reports
when I quite precisely to avoid this, but YMMV.  Really the only thing you
can't have is an open report tab that updates immediately in response to
adding or editing transaction data.

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Cat P <barking at gmx.com> wrote:

> Hi Wes,
>
> At the moment you have to change the name of a report before you can
> save the changes (adding the new report to your custom list). You can
> also change the name temporarily and go back to the old name, but the
> old report doesn't get overwritten or deleted, so you have to delete it
> manually.
>
> As far as I know there is still no way to modify a saved report without
> going through that.
>
> Cat
>
>
>
> On 26/07/2013 15:13, Wes704 wrote:
> > I am a new user and would like to save the monthly cash flow report
> > parameters. I can create and save the report I want but it appears that
> the
> > saved report is static (i.e., if I add transactions then run the saved
> > report, it retrieves the data from the time I created the report; not the
> > current data).  Is there a way to save the report so that it reports
> current
> > data?  Thank you, Wes
> >
> >
> >
> > --
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-- 
Ian Konen
iankonen at gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/iankonen
978-821-6498