So when I entered that impact socket in KMyMoney 0.9, which is how I do my exceedingly simple bookkeeping, I entered it just like that: 1-1/16″.
That worked fine, right up to the point where I exported the summary of transactions report in CSV (comma-separated-values) format and tried to open it as an OpenOffice spreadsheet: only the first third of the file made it into the spreadsheet.
Having screwed up exactly like this before, I knew where to look: CSV format wraps fields with double-quote marks and KMyMoney isn’t bright enough to escape the double-quote mark, resulting in a broken file. That may be fixed in the current version (1.0.2 right now), but I’m still running Xubuntu 8.10 with some KDE-based programs spliced in because KDE 4.x still has problems with rotated dual monitors.
That escape mechanism is actually part of the CSV standard, such as it is:
Fields with embedded double-quote characters must be enclosed within double-quote characters, and each of the embedded double-quote characters must be represented by a pair of double-quote characters.
I knew better than that, but it’s an easy mistake to make.
What really ticked me off, though, is that KMyMoney breaks the transaction into two parts (it’s a double-entry bookkeeping system, after all) and, even after I changed the double-quote to the word inch, refused to update the other half of the transaction. Furthermore, I couldn’t get access to that half; the only description I could find had inch.
Had to delete the whole entry and add it back to get it right… which was better, long term, than hand-editing the CSV file every time.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 