[GNC] Suggestion to ease newbies import problems

ornd25 at tutanota.com ornd25 at tutanota.com
Tue Sep 24 14:27:55 EDT 2019


As a newbie I did (and do) have some trouble with GnuCash, but my largest concerns were with the  import process. I have a few suggestions that might ease the path of the next newbies to come. The import process, per se, seemed to go smoothly - it was the assigning appropriate splits that took me a few weeks. May I suggest that the Tutorial and Concepts Guide, Chapter 3, be expanded very slightly with regard to comma separated value (csv) files? 

First, and most simply, the Guide refers to "Base Account" and "Destination Account," while the Import wizard itself has the word "Transfer" apparently in lieu of "Destination; I didn't understand this for some time. 

Second, the Guide in "Import Panel" refers to "minimum to import data," while "optimum" would have aided me significantly. Adding a column in a .csv file with the Destination (Transfer) would have saved me many double-clicks in the Matcher. Perhaps a sentence added would help: "Those planning to import large amounts of data by .csv will be aided by adding a Destination column in their import file."

Finally, after adding the new column, the Importer led me to a page that confused me for a short time. It said something about needing to change or add Links. On my test (well after completing this the hard way) It wanted me to change From Expenses:Miscellaneous to Expenses:Miscellaneous. I'm certain this is nothing more than a last check to ensure that you will be importing them to where you really want them, but perhaps if the words match so exactly the question might be changed to something like, "Unless you change links your Exp:Misc will have a Destination of Exp:Misc," or something similar.

There were other instances of mild confusion, but they applied to my attempting to convert credit cards as expenses to credit cards as liabilities and would not necessarily apply as broadly as the above.

On the good side, the time I spent converting 10 years of old data made me quite comfortable with GnuCash, so it wasn't time wasted.




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