HELP CENTER ABOUT HOME BUDGET

First of all, I want to thank you for downloading Home Budget.

Home Budget is a program that I use to keep my income and expenses under control.
My very first purpose was to store my depenses on file (the *.JOU files names), because it is more practical to have computer data than data on sheets (thanks to the printers). But very soon I wanted to merge the data and sort them, so files were too limited. I took the bet to make a program that could do it (I have to say that I didn't wanted to buy a too-much-complex program that a lot of people don't have). As I am an Ada fan, this langage imposed to me without hesitation. But without a good-looking appearence, this project was doomed and I was (am) very bad about constructing a windows graphic interface on my own. Then John English came to me with his JEWL, a very simple graphic interface builder. So the project took shape and, after a lot of reflexion, this window appear to me to be the most natural I could manage (this is a reduced version of the real screen, thus it is not very neat):

Let's suppose you have a journal (like "2001_11_dummy.jou") you can load by opening the File menu and be in a situation similar than the one above (here both "2001_10_dummy.jou" and "2001_11_dummy.jou" have been opened).

1. You can Load, Save journals in the upper menu, as well as erase the current journal or even getting help (this is what you read now);
2. By clicking in the buttons named "Reports", "Transactions", "Dates" and "Comments", you can sort your journal (click again to reverse sorting). Note that the number beside them indicates the ranking of sorting and if there is reverse sorting.
3. For the "Hide & Show" show, there is a list of radio buttons. In the three first, namely "Just invert", "Show all" and "Hide all", the two last are explicit, so I will only explain the very first :

   When you choose a journal for the first time, all entries are shown. When you play with the radio buttons of the "Hide & Show", you can hide some entries of the former journal. The "Just invert" radio button is usefull to hide shown entries and to show hidden entries, that's all.

   For the other buttons above line operations, it works as this :

   1. "Add something" will show entries containing 'something',
   2. "Pick something" will show only entries containing 'something',
   3. "Invert something" will apply a 'just invert'-like effect on the entries containing 'something',
   4. "Remove something" will hide the entries containing 'something'.
   When you click on 'Do as above', a panel appears to the right. In this panel you select on what you want to act.

   The lines operations are used to hide a single line or all lines with a precise report, transaction, date or comment.

4. For now, the only other choice is to "Quit" (you don't want to do that, do you ?).

Well, now the only thing you have to do is to follow the 'dummies' examples to create your own journals. For now, the only way for editing or creating a journal is to use a text editor (like Notepad). But as you can see by looking the file "structure example.jou", you are quite free to create your journal files (For Now, I see Home Budget as a LaTeX-like program where you create files with your preferred editor and you compile them with the program by simply loading them, this allows to have a presentation of your own in the *.JOU files).