[GNC] Style Sheets - general questions

[Adrien Monteleone]

You don’t even have to export to CSV.

You can ’save’ the report which will be HTML formatted and open it in a spreadsheet app, or just copy/paste to a spreadsheet.

If your are having issues with pagination/line-breaks, that is the way to go.

There are some issues (especially on MacOS) with the version of Webkit which renders the reports that affect pagination.

You *could* use the experimental all-CSS stylesheet, and tweak to your hearts content, but even then, you might have some issues.

It is, for now, much faster and easier to just move the report to a spreadsheet and manipulate from there for printing pretty.

The advantage is you also have the option of adding things like variance and percentage columns that aren’t easy to do with the standard reports. (you’d have to re-write them, using Scheme)


Regards,
Adrien

> On Jun 18, 2020 w25d170, at 5:31 PM, will at theprescotts.com wrote:
> 
> Scott,
> 
> Like you I have used GnuCash for personal use for years and now am using it for an organization I belong to. I didn't like the appearance of the standard reports. Instead of trying to customize them, I just export the transactions as a csv file and open in Apple's Numbers spreadsheet program. From there it is quick and easy to copy them to some standard spreadsheets that I use in my reports. Because the csv file contains columns with the account names it is very easy to sort them by account and or date. In fact the organize function in Numbers does a good job of breaking them up by account.
> 
> Certainly, not the only way to solve the problem, but it is a method that has worked for me.
> 
> Will
> 
> 
> On 2020 Jun 18, at 06-18 16:53:07, Scott Soderling <ssoderling at shaw.ca> wrote:
> 
> Windows 10, GnuCash 3.10 I've been using GnuCash for several years now for
> my personal use. I am now a treasurer of a members association at a golf
> club, which has used other software to do their accounting. I would like to
> transition to using GnuCash.
> 
> My questions are around report generation. For my personal use, it hasn't
> been that important. However with the club, balance sheets, income
> statements, budget reports, etc will now become important, getting the
> report into the format I like on the screen, and then to print.
> 
> I've been reading through the GC documentation and experimenting. Between
> using the options available within individual reports, along with trying
> different Style Sheets, I am encouraged that there is potential to tweak
> the report formats to my liking.
> 
> When I look at the drop down list of Style Sheets, I see the following: CSS
> (experimental), Default, Easy, Footer, Head orTail, Technicolor. After
> trying them out, I've made the following conclusions (I'm leaving out the
> experimental one for now):
> 
> *Default Style Sheet *- The entire report is left justified on the screen
> and page, Quite basic, limited color, no images. However this is the ONLY
> place that the "Table border width" setting actually does something -
> border around the entire report along with grid lines around every cell.
> This setting does nothing in any of the other Style Sheets that I can see.
> 
> *Easy, Footer, and Technicolor Style Sheets* - Report is centered on the
> screen and page, more options than Default. Unless I'm missing something,
> they are identical.
> 
> *Head or Tail Style Sheet* - Similar to the above three sheets, with more
> data displayed in either the header or footer area of the report.
> 
> Now some questions.....
> 
> 1. Why are the Easy, Footer and Technicolor style sheets all the same?
> 2. Why does the "Table border width" setting only work with the Default
> Style Sheet? I can see instances where that grid effect would be good with
> the other Style Sheets.
> 3. Why aren't printed multi-page reports formatted for each page? Page
> breaks just fall wherever they fall, headings aren't repeated at the top of
> each page, no options for displaying page numbers, etc.
> 
> I think GnuCash is a great piece of software. I'm just trying to understand
> how to get output from it the way I want. Thanks very much for all replies.