[GNC] elementary questions

[m.x. keating]

GnuCash User List ahoy:

A thank you to Derek Atkins & to David Carlson for confirming my 
suspicion that attaching a .pdf caused the assassination of my previous 
message. I thought it possible that the .pdf would not survive, but 
didn’t expect the entire message to be rejected as if it had a bad address.

As suggested, I do use LibreOffice when composing a message, because of 
the poor quality of the in-built text editor in Thunderbird. LO does not 
help with formatting, however, since all formatting but the most basic 
is lost when transferring into an email client like TB for transmission.

So it’s not quite as simple as just asking the question whilst ignoring 
the lost formatting, at least not to this letterpress printer, who is 
used to having control of appearance, but I will append my original 
submission below, and will see how it fares.

Among other defects in this process is the presumed loss of the italic 
sections, which are helpful to distinguish comments from questions, 
Also, I originally used some colour to highlight the problem in the 
manual section, and I daresay that will not survive either.

LibreOffice’s user list has a procedure for handling .pdfs, screenshots, 
&c, by storing them in special places, outside the list, but I haven’t 
had occasion to do that for years. Does GnuCash have a similar ability, 
and, if so, where should one store the file? And in a similar vein, how 
does one sign up to this list, to see the regular flow of questions & 
answers, and to receive any replies to my questions that are not also 
sent to me independently?

    Now follows my original submission:

As background, I should say that I once made a fair living building 
special hardware, and programming it (in assembly language), so I was 
not (at an earlier time) completely ignorant in computer matters. 
However, I have since aged beyond any ability to comprehend most of what 
now confronts me, hence some questions.

I keep all my GnuCash files – the various programme versions, 
auxiliaries, and their data files – on 3 USB sticks. One is kept at a 
remote location, the other two where I now am, one of those 2 acting as 
a 2^nd backup. The main stick travels with me as I move from place to 
place, and the data gets occasionally copied to the then-local spare as 
backup.

Whenever any of those sticks is in a USB port, I physically disconnect 
the associated computer from the modem and the outside world. Whether or 
not this provides any security is a good question. It seems to me that 
if any malfactor could get access to my machine(s), s/he could install a 
keystroke logger which would render all such security attempts null & void.

I would be interested in any opinions on that topic, but my main 
problems of the moment lie elsewhere.

I have had to move my operations to a new/old WIN10 machine, since my 
old WIN7 motherboard died. Since everything GnuCash is on the stick, 
this sort of change normally makes no difference, the programmes and 
data moving effortlessly from machine to machine. That has not been the 
case recently, but I might have to admit that my problems there might 
just have stemmed from drive-letter misidentification.

I have18**scheduled monthly transaction set ups, and that is where the 
fun began. 2 of them went absolutely berserk. Both are deposits, with 
one amount being regular and pre-fixed, the other showing a dummy $9.99 
that gets corrected with the actual figure each month as the real data 
comes in.

The most-recent versions of both of these deposits were somehow 
auto-replicated by GnuCash for every month back to March of this year, 
right alongside the true values which had already been long-since 
entered and reconciled. Those 14 fake entries made for a very impressive 
apparent balance, but, unfortunately, that reflected no reality.

It was also fortunate that each of them showed an “N” in the “R” column, 
so it was relatively easy to track them down and expunge them.

All’s well for the nonce, but I would like to know what could possibly 
have happened here, if for no better reason than to avoid a repetition. 
I have not the faintest idea of what sort of operator error on my part 
could have created this imbroglio. I am not aware of any command that 
says, in effect, /“duplicate these two register entries for each of the 
preceding 7 months”. /The entries themselves go back a number of years, 
so “7 months” seems utterly arbitrary.

My other major GnuCash problem involves its data files. When originally 
set up, I had what I thought was good reason to split my accounts 
between 2 /*files*/. With the passage of time, that no longer makes any 
sense, and now proves inconvenient, so I would like to merge the two 
files into one. Doing so would save a lot of saving and switching.

I am talking 2 /*files*/, not accounts, and have not yet found any way 
to merge them.

I have gotten so far as to export the account list, and the associated 
data, as separate .csv files, but see no way to re-load them, whilst 
combining them into one file in the process.

I have, at the moment, both 3.11 and 4.8 on hand. I understand that 3.11 
is the latest version that can run properly on WIN7, so I have to keep 
3.11 around, at least for awhile, whilst two of my machines are still on 
7. That raises the question: if I use 4.8 where applicable, will the 
data files written from it be readable on the 3.11 version? Limited 
experimentation suggests that the answer is “Yes”, but I’d like to be 
assured that there are no problems lying hidden if I count on this.

    /Some notes re: manuals. //It would help if you p//ut //the
    //applicable //version //o//n //the //title //page//, so it’s
    obvious. //It can always be found, but //now //takes a little digging./

    /The e//pub //edition //has no page number//s//, //at least with the
    reader I am using. /

    /The//.pdf //edition //may //prove //not easy to copy from, //and
    may be immune to “find” attacks, //so perhaps a .odt version
    //w//ould be useful./

    /In case typos are of interest here, we find the following: /

    The Advanced... button brings up the Scheduled Transaction Editor’s
    dialog to Edit the Scheduled Transaction. This is described in the
    section Scheduled Transaction Editor. the section called “Edit
    Scheduled Transaction Window”.

    This is on page 65/77 of the4.8 manual, and looks to be an edit
    stuck part-way thru.

We come across frequent instances of the message:

“/Please insert a disk into drive Device\Harddisk6\DR6” /

which must mean something to somebody, but the notion of putting a disc 
into a hard disc seems just ludicrous to the casual observer. I don’t 
know how to replicate this message on demand, but assume that any 
GnuCash adept will understand where it comes from, and why.


T. R. Jackson


mxkeating at comcast.net