Can't adjust width of last column

[David T.]

David,

I appreciate your workarounds. Unfortunately, the problem is that the balance column defaults to a width that does not always show all digits in a balance. Users often have to figure out how to resize this column if they wish to view the complete balance. Frankly, if I were to pick any column to set to auto-expand, I would have chosen the balance, rather than the description. But I am not a programmer, so I didn’t get to make that decision.

In light of providing some kind of solution, I suggest adding a second note following the note in section 2.3.3 of the Concept Guide:

Note: Double-clicking on any column heading will resize that heading to fit the widest information in that register element. This is an easy way, for example, to increase the width of the account's Balance column.

It’s not perfect, but it is accurate, and may help others figure this out on their own.

David T.


> On Sep 17, 2015, at 8:31 PM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I personally have considered another 'solution' to this problem that is
> anything but practical for most users, and that is to acquire a high
> resolution monitor with at least 1024 or more pixels horizontal
> resolution.  On my desk I have 1600 x 1200 resolution and even there I wish
> that I had more resolution.  My eyes require at least 70 Hz refresh rate to
> hide flicker, too.
> 
> I like verbose descriptions and lengthy account names, so there is
> generally a lot of text that simply is not on the screen for me, so I
> empathize strongly about this issue.  I do structure my descriptions to
> have the most important words on the left and account names to have the
> keywords more to the right, but that only goes so far.  For account names
> the most important word is always on the far left by the design of the
> account tree.  There I assign colors to help.
> 
> There is one other thing that may help some users.  I think that for some
> reason GnuCash defaults to a rather large font so the text is much larger
> than the text on the desktop or in some other applications.  If I recall,
> there is a user setting somewhere for font size which is hard to find and
> works somewhat oddly so that I did not play with it much in my machines,
> but it may help other users to know about it.
> 
> David C
> 
> On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 6:45 PM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> On 9/17/2015 4:37 PM, David T. wrote:
>> 
>> For what it’s worth, there is simply no way to adjust the Balance column
>> in Mac OS X except to double click the column heading. When I put the bug
>> in, there were numerous reports of problems on Windows machines as well.
>> Perhaps there was a change in behavior under Windows in the ensuing three
>> years…
>> 
>> It is with a little trepidation that I point out that this issue would
>> probably not exist if the Description column weren’t set to autoexpand to
>> fill the available space. I have always felt that this behavior was…
>> idiosyncratic, to say the least. It has confused many users over the years.
>> Most software packages I use have a model wherein the user can grab the
>> column dividers to resize columns, or double-click any column to
>> auto-adjust the width of that column. While it may have seemed like a good
>> idea at the time, given the expectations of many users, I wonder whether
>> this decision still stands the test of time.
>> 
>> Adding notes to the documentation is one solution; changing the interface
>> to match user expectations might be another.
>> 
>> David T.
>> 
>> 
>> Well, you can tell that I do not have any Apple devices anywhere near me.
>> So Mac OS or Mac OS X is what you have on your Mac and i OS is what runs on
>> i-phones, if I can believe what I read in Wikipedia.  David , sorry about
>> the misteak.
>> 
>> I really do not like waiting for an event like the roll-out of Register2
>> which depends on a lot of code infrastructure changes, but I think that
>> without a lot more help from volunteers like a few of us where possible, it
>> will be a long time before this and certain other annoying 'bugs' ever get
>> fixed.  The active developers and active volunteers have very limited
>> resources and we need to be grateful for their contributions.
>> 
>> David C
>> 
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