GnuCash quick start

[Ed Willink]

Hi

I'm an Open Source developer, so I naturally looked for an Open Source 
accounting tool and found GnuCash. Thank you for providing it.

For the most part I found it did what I needed, but you failed my quick 
start test; demonstrating to the user within 5 minutes, preferably 
within 1 minute that the newly installed software does something worth 
taking more time to exploit.

I obviously didn't want to read-the-manual or follow a mega/paid 
tutorial. What defeated me when I pursued a trial-and-error approach was 
that Create-Transaction is so important that it is built-in and so has 
no menu entry. Even though I got past the "New-Project" hurdle quite 
quickly, I couldn't create any transactions. Eventually a 15 minute 
YouTube video showed me the missing trick.

You could solve this very easily by ensuring that a Welcome-screen / 
first-Hint-of-the-day enables a very simple example set of accounts to 
be created so that an up and running system is ready to play with almost 
instantly. You might even provide a short list of challenges, guiding 
the user through the most important "Add-Transaction", Jump, Duplicate, 
BalanceSheet etc facilities. Perhaps New->Example could have more than 
one canned example to play with.

     Regards

         Ed Willink