News

Starting with this release, the symbols and formats for the display of currencies and percentages now reflect what the user has selected under the international settings panel in system preferences. A side effect of this is that negative currency amounts now show up with parenthesis instead of a negative sign (for the US at least). This more closely follows the convention for financial tables in the US. Note that no actual currency conversions are done, just the symbols are switched. Dates and times also follow the international settings by the way, but this behavior has been in effect for several releases now.

A few changes were also made to improve the compactness of the column data. For example, currency values over a trillion and percentages over a million now display in scientific notation. This allows huge values to be more easily viewed and without requiring the column to be resized really wide to see them. Although most people could only dream of seeing currency values this huge (but perhaps in the case of some small valued currencies), percentages can get pretty big in the case of annualized return when the investment has not been held very long. Another improvement to the compactness of percentages is now the decimal point and digits after are not shown for whole numbers.

The stock ticker column in the stock view can now be edited. This may come in handy when a stock ticker changes for a particular company. Changing it once in the stock view will automatically update all the transactions and investment records that refer to that stock record to reflect the new ticker. You may still want to manually update the arbitrary label field for any investments that refer to the old stock ticker after a ticker change (unless you change your labels to refer to the company name or something else), or you could just ignore the investment label altogether since it’s just arbitrary text. Note that the stock ticker may be changed to a ticker that is already in use in the document (already shows up in another row in the stock table). In this case, the existing stock record will be deleted after moving all the investments referring to it to the newly edited stock record. This is to insure there is only one stock record per ticker.

We are getting close to a release candidate for FolioCalc. There are a few import file formats that still need to be tested, but thats about it. New feature ideas will probably not go into the 1.0 but may show up in 1.X releases as free upgrades if they are not too major. Then at a later date there may be a 2.0 which would include major new features and require a paid upgrade.