Replace a category

Thanks for the response, sbourne. However, what I am trying to do is replace one category with another existing category, not just rename one. For example, I have 50 transactions with the category "Personal:Groceries" and 50 with the category "Food:Groceries". I want to, in this example, replace the category "Food:Groceries" with the category "Personal:Groceries" and have all the transactions with the category "Food:Groceries" automatically moved to the category "Personal:Groceries" so that "Personal:Groceries" will then contain all 100 transactions and "Food:Groceries" will be deleted. I tried moving the "Food:Groceries" category to the parent "Personal" but that just leaves me with two "Personal:Groceries" categories. If I then dellete the second "Personal:Groceries" category, it will just delete the 50 transactions in that category. I'm sure I could do this by exporting my data to an XML file and then doing a find and replace, but I would like to know if it's possible through the app.

No. There isn't an easy way to do this. I needed to do the same thing, so I wrote an extension to do it. I thought I would add it to the Google Code Moneydance project once I can get added to the project.

cool let me know!

I thought select/highlight transactions, right click - batch change.. No????

Hmm.. Thanks for the tip, Katahdin. I never knew about this and it sounded like exactly what I want, the only problem is selecting the hundreds of transactions to be changed. If I do a find, there is no category option. I can find all transactions where the "account" is the category I want, but if I then view transactions and select all and batch change category then I think they fall into a void, transfering money from one category to another.

-- I was about to post this when I found that I can just go to my account(s) and add a search filter of "Food:Groceries" and then I think this will work. I have to do it for each of my accounts so it is not ideal, but it works so thank you! But if anyone knows of an easy way to identify all the transactions with a particular category, please let me know.

Hmm... not good for Split transactions either.. updates the whole split to the new category (as you'd expect)...

-- Edit: Scratch that.. it looks like it leaves splits untouched which is ok if I only have a few splits, I can update them manually. But looks like I'm SOL if I have a lot of them.

I dont t have the time , energy or desire to test out, but two things.

Not necessarily addressed - besides filtering, (or after filtering) you can sort the transactions by clicking on the title of ANY field/column to group like categories - this will (i expect) leave the splits out of the group - also as part of the selection process - you can click/highlight all or un-highlight the splits that you need to change later. Then use the batch function to chg the category.

re: splits - what about going to the category register to make the changes via highlighting / batch chg?

Pls post results.

What you say for not modifying splits with the rest would work (I assume), thanks. But actually I had noticed that when I included the splits in my selection that it just left them alone, so I went that way. Now by "category register" I assume you mean what you get when you go to Edit Categories and double click a category, but correct me if I'm wrong as I don't know a whole lot about this type of software. If that's what you mean then, yes, I have tried what you said and that causes the transaction to get lost since the category on that record should be the account that the money came from. I believe I want to change the "account" in this case, but I don't have my categories as choices when I batch change - account.