On 07/03/2019 20:03, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
Derek,

I don’t disagree with your assessments of what certainly *can* (and maybe even, 
more often than not) be specific to a book rather than a user. I was thinking 
more along the lines of what someone *might* most likely want to carry over 
across multiple books. For example, I keep books for a few entities. Everything 
is in USD. (except for my personal book which has a smattering of left over 
currency from travels and some bullion I track as currency) I have no need for 
other currencies, and likely never will. At the least, I’d want to start books 
for a new entity, should one arise, with that same default currency in my 
reports. (simple enough since the default book currency is also the default 
report currency)

But I might also like to never show zero balance amounts or the corresponding 
accounts, and I might like to always roll up the sub account totals into the 
parent (since I set all parents as placeholders) and *not* show any duplicative 
’total’ lines.

These were the types of settings I was thinking of that someone might want to 
carry over across all books and maybe even all reports. (where applicable) The 
same might very well applied to financial periods.

Separating preferences for reports is, I suspect, more useful to a multi-user 
environment, which GnuCash does not support, but can be useful for a single 
user who keeps books for multiple entities that are all in the same 
jurisdiction and might well even use the same CPA. (and certainly have to file 
the same tax forms) They might even all follow a July-June fiscal year, for 
example.

It might be that this is too small of a use case, and the user’s setup work so 
light that the development burden is simply not worth the effort. (and I’m by 
no means advocating for more work for the team already, I’m just chiming in 
with my own user story to consider.)

I started a project to map out report preferences as part of a revamp of the 
tab content and I didn’t finish it. Perhaps completing that project will offer 
more insight. (and very likely allow me to discover that the present situation 
is optimal)

If you're doing accounting for yourself and never plan to use a different computer or operating system, know how to make backups and are infallible (think about that list) the 3.x model is fine.

OK, the infallibility is extreme but the 3.x file structure is just putting stuff all over the place without apparent thought.

There are really simple answers to this, they presume
===
don't do what Microsoft told you to do
===
especially since they don't do it themselves in their own products.
===


No one in their right mind puts reports that depend on exact information in another file in personal file space *AND* expects things to work when any of so many things change.

Another e.g. someone sets up a report, their PC has got a bit cluttered, they run a popular disk cleaner, result? Report is AWOL.

--
Wm




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