Advanced Portfolio Report

[David T.]

David,

Given your comment, I have modified the Advanced Report description to be a little more accurate.

Certainly, improving how reports handle missing or problematic data is admirable. 

However, my goal in editing the wiki is far more pedestrian: I seek only to get some kind of description in place for each of the standard reports that are included with GnuCash. This is by way of improving the documentation set (cf. Bug 633590, which goes into the reports documentation at length) so that this basic information can be distributed to users who might benefit from knowing just what these reports might do for them. Eventually, my goal is to add a chapter in the Guide that discusses the reports that are available and how they can be used and managed. This is an area that stumps a lot of new users.

I am happy to note that, with the exception of the Budget reports (which I neither understand, nor can describe), nearly every standard report now has a basic description in the wiki. It may be time to push forward with the aforementioned bug...

Cheers,
David (T.)

> On Oct 18, 2016, at 10:23 PM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> David,
> 
> Thanks for volunteering to take a dive into report documentation.
> 
> As an occasional and sometimes frustrated user of the advanced portfolio report and also the various 'over time' reports, I think that they all accept manually entered prices, but they all suffer from what I think is a common problem that they all behave poorly when they encounter missing prices in the source data.
> 
> I think that the documentation at this time should try to identify the types of report errors that arise from missing data, and, if possible, ways to identify what data is missing so the user can try to fill in the gaps.
> 
> I think that often the best way to fill in gaps is to pick out zeros that should not be appearing in one of these reports then running a mini report around that part of the data to close in on what is missing.  This quickly becomes overly tedious when there is a lot of data.
> 
> Ultimately I would like to work toward concrete proposals to improve the reports responses to missing data, but right now I do not have any good ideas.  One possibility might be for some of these reports to have a diagnostic option to highlight values that are missing underlying data, but that would be very difficult to define and implement.
> 
> Thanks for listening,
> 
> 
> David C 
> 
> On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 10:35 AM, David T. via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org <mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I was looking at the description on the GnuCash Wiki for the Advanced Portfolio report (http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Using_GnuCash#Advanced_Portfolio <http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Using_GnuCash#Advanced_Portfolio> <http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Using_GnuCash#Advanced_Portfolio <http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Using_GnuCash#Advanced_Portfolio>>). It reads as follows:
> 
> "The Advanced Portfolio report produces reports using price information collected by the optional stock price retrieval features of GnuCash. (If you have not installed and used the additional stock price retrieval software, the report will indicate an error.)”
> 
> I am curious to know if the statement regarding “optional stock retrieval features” is in fact true. Is it possible that this report will work with prices that are manually added, or does it truly only work with prices retrieved via Finance::Quote? Furthermore, is there any reason NOT to name Finance::Quote directly here?
> 
> Cheers,
> David
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