Personal Finance Example

# Using List for Personal Finance This is a real life example from a user who would like to remain anonymous. In this case List is being used to display data from a PC application. I have a PC-Based application that handles my personal finances. I used to publish my current account balances to my PalmPilot by using SendKeys to load a memo. That worked okay but was a bit slow and I wanted a solution that was more "high tech". Besides, the memo data looked pretty ugly, primarily because the font in the memo bodies is proportional rather than fixed width and, therefore, I could not align information effectively. Note that it doesn't line up well and that there is no way to get details like the checknumber and transaction amount (what is show is the running balance). List gave me a much better tool for presenting the data. I have a category for each account and within each category I have a list of lines that have the date/description to the left and running balance to the right. This looks pretty good as the running balances are right aligned, which is what you want. I stored more detailed information like the individual transaction amount, check number... in the Notes field so you can get to these as well (but they don't clutter up the list view which is the main thing I use). I load the data via the ListDB program. I have VBA code that outputs a CSV with my account information in the format used by ListDB. Then I trigger the running of ListDB. Then I pend the resultant PDB for installation at next Hot-Sync (via sendkeys commands to the PalmPilot desktop application). The value of this example is that with a little bit of script work (or simple programming) you can turn the data on your PC into something that List can display. Popular spread sheet programs like Excel support .csv formats that are very close to the format that listdb.exe uses, a few simple edits and your spreadsheet data is a List database.