FIRST IMPRESSIONS + Importing from Excel.csv

[royverb]

I am using an investment strategy termed "Trend Following" (as defined by Wikipedia) applied to Canadian Mutual Funds. Over the past 5 years I have been using the Toronto Globe and Mail (G+M) website with a data base that is now called the Fundlist (old). Three or four times a year, my windows security update for IE will delete my cookies and I then have to re-enter my database. The G+M now has a new where my database is not tied into preservation of my cookies, but it does not provide %change data for MTD or YTD, so it is not nearly as useful.

So I am using the Fund Manager software on Trial. I am already running into "problems" and as is the case with so much software, it is due to lack of information. I would like to simply follow the Help tutorial and not have to immerse myself in a BLOG to get answers.

As such, whenever I invest (waste?) a few hours of my time trying to complete a function, I will provide feedback in the hope that the Help tutorial will be modified to address my issues and future users will benefit.

1. The FM does not provide connections to the Mutual Funds that I acquire. I buy "F" class funds and it appears that the FM identifies "A" or "B" class funds. My intention in using the FM is to identify trends: rising to buy and falling to sell, with stop-losses in place. Therefore, the data analysis that can be provided by FM may be useful in identifying trends in the Mutual Funds that I own, but will not be useful for keeping track of gains, losses etc.

2. My investment accounts are held at HSBC. Is there a reason that it cannot be included in the linked accounts?

3. After identifying the Mutual Fund symbols (from Yahoo - with no correlation to the actual Mutual Fund symbols), entering them into my spreadsheet with my transaction data from the HSBC and saving as a CSV file, I cannot import the data into FM. I get an "error message" stating "Could not find all the specified fields in the importing file". I have tried everything with the spreadsheet, from deleting column headings to changing the format of the numbers, to deleting optional columns.

IF THE TUTORIAL SHOWED A SAMPLE SPREADSHEET THAT WAS INTENDED TO BE IMPORTED, THEN I WOULD BE ABLE TO SEE WHAT I HAVE THAT IS DIFFERENT THAT MIGHT BE CAUSING THE PROBLEM.

Now I will go off to the fog of the blog and see what can be found there.

[Mark]

Hi royverb,

Thanks for trying Fund Manager.

1) Fund Manager supports retrieving prices from a wide variety of quote servers. If any of them have your funds, then you can retrieve them in Fund Manager. These quote servers don't have everything, but they do offer a wide variety of quotes. For links to all the quote servers, see:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/intrtv.html

You can use your web browser, and go to these sites, to see if any of them offer the quotes you need (the "F" class). It may be that you just need to switch to a different quote server, and use the appropriate symbol from that quote server.

2) We support any broker or mutual fund company that offers the required "Open Financial Exchange" (OFX) server. We are not aware of HSBC offering such a server. If they make one available, we will add support for it. Also, to the best of our knowledge, no Canadian broker or mutual fund company offers an OFX server. For a little more on this topic, see:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/faq_ ... upport.php

3) If you press the "Help..." button from within the "File / Import / Prices / Generic..." dialog you will see some examples. If you still have questions, please post a sample line from your importing file, along with the format string you're using.

[tokyo_trader]

Hi,

I am having the same problems.
I cannot seem to format the CSV file into a recognizable format...
This is very stressful. I agree with royverb when he said:
IF THE TUTORIAL SHOWED A SAMPLE SPREADSHEET THAT WAS INTENDED TO BE IMPORTED, THEN I WOULD BE ABLE TO SEE WHAT I HAVE THAT IS DIFFERENT THAT MIGHT BE CAUSING THE PROBLEM.

Basically I have DL historical prices for JPYUSD=X from Oanda. I then try to import this file using: File>Import>Prices>Generic

Every time I click on 'import' I get the message:
"The specified input format did not match any lines in the imported file"...

Considering that nearly every user of FM DL's historic exchange rates from Oanda, I would expect to see a tutorial on how to go about it.... We are not all CSV experts. I have wasted hours trying to figure this out, please can you help?

So far I think the program is great, but I also think it is not intuitive for new users and that more detailed tutorials are required or at least a step by step new user guide.

Thanks

tokyo_trader

[Mark]

Hi tokyo_trader,

Thanks for the feedback. Sounds like we need to improve the help here... I just took a look at the FAQ on updating historical exchange rate prices, and it was out-dated. I've just updated it and added some more detail. Please see:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/faq_ ... wnload.php

After reading the above, you probably won't need samples, but for some samples you can press "Help" from within the generic price import dialog. The online help topic describes how to use this feature, and has several examples. With a CSV file I often find it most useful to view it in a text editor, like Notepad. This way you can see all the characters, including double quotes, that Excel can often hide from you. If there are double quotes in the file, then you need to include them in the format string, as shown on the FAQ page above.