New user transitioning from Quicken

[Colin Law]

On 1 May 2016 at 06:53, Leo Simon <leosimon at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Hi everybody.
>
> Like many users of gnucash, I've been using Linux for years and the only
> reason I keep a windows virtualbox is to have access to quicken.     I have
> very much hoped that gnucash would allow me to jettison Windows forever, but
> so far it appears that's sadly not to be an attainable goal.
>
> I've read the section of the manual for transitioning-from-Quicken users
> like me, but amazingly it doesn't address the most basic questions that all
> quicken users must surely want an answer to.    The first of these is:  how
> to/if it's indeed possible to  reproduce the analog of Quicken's check
> registers.       The manual has an entire chapter devoted to the transition
> process, but amazingly---and this seems to be a pattern---it doesn't appear
> to anywhere address the simplest of simple questions:   can I get the same
> functionality out of gnucash that I get out of Quicken?
>
> The manual seems to suggest that working with Accounts rather than
> Categories will make your life easier, whereas it's abundantly clear that,
> at least for long-time quicken-users,  it makes your life *much* harder.

Just think of categories as being the same as expense accounts.  When
you enter a transaction to pay for something from your bank account
(for example), you just open your bank account to add the transaction
but instead of selecting a category (as in quicken) you select an
equivalent expense account.  So I don't see where it is that much
different.  Perhaps you can explain what it is that is making it
harder for you.

> Specifically, the first thing that I want to be able to do is abstract from
> gnucash's account structure and look at all my transactions in a ledger that
> matches my online ledger with my bank.    In other words, I've been unable
> to get "outside" of gnucash's account structure, and see a date-sorted list
> of *all* my transactions, rather than see, individually, all of by
> transactions that belong to a particular Account.

I can't help thinking you (or I) am missing something here.  If you
open the register for you bank account is that not the same as the
online ledger with your bank?

>      To say it in yet a
> different way, I simply want to see a replica of my bank statement within
> gnucash.     Presumably, *everybody* who has ever used Quicken must
> desparately want to see the same thing, so it *presumably* must be possible.

As I said, is that not just the register view of your bank account?

Colin