Introduction

For some time I just wanted to feed in all of my expected expenses and revenues in a simple spreadsheet so I could see when in the year I’m going to end up in a negative cash-flow situation. Over the years I tries several money softwares. I even paid for some of them. But eventually I ended up quitting using them. Fully enough the one I ended up liking the most: Budget Express came out of a cereal box ( yeah really! ) as a demo CD. It came with a fully functional 30 day trial which I probably used fully. The software back then ( version 3 ) had a few annoying limitations but it had a cash flow view I liked. Although you’d think that would a default view in all software it wasn’t in the 50$ Quicken. Also, because those two being Windows only, I ended up stopped using them too.

Later I decided to try an open source solution called: GNUCASH GNUCASH isn’t the easier or the most straightforward to use. It seems to allow a great deal of reports and operations but as it is often the case for open source softwares, the basic stuff is intuitive enough and decently covered in the  documentation. On the other hand, the more advanced feature are but poorly documented impacting greatly on the perception of the software. Again, that cash flow over time view didn’t seemed to be available.

I ended up spending (or wasting based on to whom you’re asking ) almost a full day figuring out every single details about the LibreOffice basic because there isn’t such a thing as code completion and the documentation isn’t great at all. For most everything I ended up querying google. The basic and/or scripting feature being to be experimental or very little used in general I didn’t wanted to make things more difficult by using a more complex solution involving Python, C++ or JavaScript. My Python skills aren’t that great anyway I’ve created the OOCashFlowViewer on GitHub so it’s available in case it turns out to be useful to anyone.

The Basics of Open Office Basic

Accessing an individual cell:

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