[GNC] Transcation Search & Replace

[Adrien Monteleone]

The best and safest one has already been mentioned.

1. Conduct a ‘Find’ as appropriate to build a working list of transactions.
2. Trudge through them one by one making the desired changes.

That sounds daunting, but it depends on the info being changed.

If you just want to change the name of an account, then edit the account. (not the transactions)

If you want to move *all* transactions from one account to another existing account, and leave *no* other transactions behind afterwards, then simply delete the undesired account. GnuCash will prompt you for where to move the transactions.

If you only want to move *some* transactions from one account to another, then best to do a Find which will generate a Search Results tab. You’ll have to do them one-by-one, but as you re-assign them, they’ll disappear from the search results, and when it is empty, you are done. This can be quite tedious if you have hundreds or thousands of such transactions. However, with even a few dozen, the work isn’t too bad, and now that you can direct-search when entering an account, it will go much faster than with previous versions. (direct-search is available in 4.0)

If you are changing Description/Notes, there’s no easy fix other than steps 1 & 2 above. And this time, you don’t get a reducing list. You’ll have to keep track of which ones are done or not.


Regards,
Adrien



> On Jul 2, 2020 w27d184, at 2:57 PM, listsub3 <listsub3 at liberator-systems.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Typically bulk search replace changes would be for things like transaction category/account, changes in names in description/notes. etc.
> 
> My GC data folder is currently 46mb (I have quite a lot of histrorical stuff).
> 
> Seems like quite a functional omission in GC to me - it must be quite a common user task - I don't have an old Quicken on this machine but I know it used to be a breeze with that.
> 
> Searching this list I found an an old response to the same question which indicated that this functionality would only be considered once GC had moved to a databese strcuture?
> 
> What are the workaraounds?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> John