Reporting - Was: Reliability of Gnu Cash software

[Tommy Trussell]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 1:28 PM, Barry Rosenberg
<dovierosenberg at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 8:21 AM, Mike or Penny Novack <
> stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >> I do NOT format the reports within gnucash. In the beginning I asked our
> > accountants "should I write custom reports to do that?" (I made my living
> > designing financial system software) but was told "Don't bother. Just
> > export the raw reports and we will use our favorite editing program to do
> > that because then have the full power of an editor available." So I don't
> > miss gnucash not having that facility at all. Would be "reinventing the
> > wheel" to have gnucash incorporate an editor with full capabilities.
> >
> > Michael D Novack, FLMI
> >
> > Mike,
>
> I'm curious how you do this. The most common way I've seen mentioned on
> this list is to generate a transaction report, export that as HTML, and
> import it into Excel.
>
> Because of the column alignment, this method requires much manual work to
> get it into a useful format.
>
> What is your method of exporting raw reports?
>
> -Barry
>


There are several ways, but many (not sure about all) of the GnuCash
reports have a report option called "Table for Exporting."

Try this:

1) Open your report in GnuCash. (If it's open, make sure the report's tab
is active.)
2) Edit --> Report Options [or click the "gear" icon in the toolbar] -->
General (tab)
3) Check "Table for Exporting"
4) Apply the setting to the report

Then you can export using the clipboard:
1) Using your mouse, drag across the text of the report, or "select all"
(Ctrl-A)*
2) Edit --> Copy (Ctrl-C)*
3) Open your other program (spreadsheet or word processor) to a blank
document
4) Edit --> Paste (Ctrl-V)*

*I'm not sure if the keyboard commands work the same on all platforms or
window managers.

If for some reason copy-paste doesn't work for you, you can also export the
report to your disk and open the html file:

1) Open report in GnuCash
2) File --> Export --> Export Report [or click the "pyramid arrow sphere"
icon in the toolbar]
3) Save the file where you can find it.
4) Open the file using your browser, spreadsheet or word processor program.



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