[moneydance] Global changes??

[Andrew Bennett]

Quoting pscherz <pscherz at gmail.com>:
>
> I would like to re-organize the catagories I am currently using.  Is there
> away to do a 'global' change to the catagories a transaction is assigned to?
>
> For example:  If I have 50 entries in a catagory, say 'Postage Paid', and I
> want to changed all 50 entries to a catagory ' business:postage'.

If "business:postage" doesn't exist yet, just Edit the "Postage Paid"  
category, give it a new name and change its parent to 'business'.   
easy-peas!


I, too, just did a major reorganization of my categories (there must  
be something in the air, or Internet tubes!) and wanted to merge two  
major categories into one:

If "business:postage" does exist and has a significant number of  
transactions in it (too many to manually move to "Postage Paid" and  
then delete "business:postage" and rename "Postage Paid") than this  
can be accomplished by editing the xml file.  Be sure to back up your  
file before starting!  You can really screw things up in a  
non-recoverable fashion when editing the xml file.  The steps are,  
basically:

- back up your original .md file.
- from Moneydance, File | Export and select the type as XML
- in the xml file, look for the two categories and find their "<ACCTID>"s.
- do a global search-and-replace to replace the "Postage Paid" ACCTID  
value to the "business:postage" ACCTID value.
   - When setting your search text I'd use something like  
"<ACCTID>19</ACCTID>" because you don't want to change _every_  
instance of '19' in the file.
   - make sure you didn't accidentally change the ACCTID vale of  
Postage Paid (or you'll get an error when you try to open your  
modified xml file)
- open the xml file from moneydance and verify everything looks right.  
  Double-check that the old "Postage Paid" transactions are now in the  
"business:postage" category. The "Postage Paid" category should be  
empty, and if so you can delete it.
- if you already backed up your original .md file, you can File | Save  
As over your .md file (or better yet, give it a new name and use that  
new name for a while until you're confident everything is still okay)


Andrew

-- 
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Andrew Bennett
abennet1 at gonzaga.edu