Spelled G.N.U.

The Gorse Fox faced several problems during the on-going saga of Microsoft Money and personal finance software. (To recap - the files that MS Money creates on one machine do not work on the new machine - with exactly the same version of the MS Money software, and files it exports from old machine will not import into the new machine).

• How would he structure the Spreadsheet to prove a single input sheet for transactions that automatically summarised them against separate account sheets?
• How would he import OFX and QIF files into OOCalc?

The first issue was soon resolved with some judicious use of MATCH and OFFSET functions and GF was pleased to see the automatic population of individual account sheets from the input sheet. A test run of 1100 transactions was applied in the blink of an eye.

The second problem was more intractable. GF found a routine online that purported to meet the bill - but on examination of the detail it seemed to fail and just ignore certain transactions. Plan B might be to rewrite that code - but not wishing to gain a long-term maintenance load, GF decided to review once more the product he examined yesterday.

Eventually he downloaded the open source GnuCash. It immediately was able to consume all the files that Microsoft had barfed on and in about 3 minutes GF had a working personal finance system again. The underlying paradigm is a little different and will take some acclimatisation, but so far it looks pretty good. He'll stick with it for now and keep the OOCalc sheet as Plan C!