Do Not Display Zero Sh. Bal. does not work

[paul3nt]

I use FM/Personal ver 11.4 with Quote 425 and Trans. 152.

When I click Report Preferences/General/ Do Not Display Investments with Zero Share Balance/ On Ending Report Date; Many investments with zero share balances nevertheless continue to display in a Portfolio Value Report.

How do I fix this ?

Thanks for the help.

Paul3nt

[StarBright2011]

Paul3nt,

While viewing a report, click the "View" menu. If "Hidden Investments/Portfolios" is checked, uncheck it. This may be what you are experiencing.

Ernest

[paul3nt]

Found the problem View/Hide Investments Portfolios was clicked ! This view menu overrides the Option/Report Preferences/Do Not Hide Investments with Zero Share Balance/On the date of the Report menu Hey Mark, this is just bad software design: having redundant menus one of which is dominant is very confusing.

May I suggest that in the next update of FM, you eliminate the Options menu for reporting zero share balances OR a little reminder there to go to View/Hide Investments to correct the problem ?

Paul3nt

[Mark]

Hi Paul3nt,

Thanks for the feedback. You are not the first person to be confused by this, so I think some improvement makes sense. These two options are not redundant, as they don't do the same thing. The report option allows you to automatically "hide" investments that you don't own for some time period. There are other ways to hide investments: manually setting the "Hidden" investment property, or using the "Hide Sold Investments..." dialog. The top level "View / Hidden Investments/Portfolios" menu item is a global option that either hides such investments based on these settings, or it always displays all investments. This is a necessary override in order to view hidden investments, and have access to them again if necessary.

Maybe we could add a note in the dialog near the option to hide investments with zero share balances about this "View / Hidden Investments/Portfolios" option. Or, maybe we could give a warning if you turn on the option to hide zero shared investments, but you have on the top level "View / Hidden Investments/Portfolios" option.

[Djobydjoba]

Hi Mark,

Sorry but I agree with Paul3nt : there's a strange implementation of the Hidden Investments/Portfolio option. You seem to consider the option must override the other options the user has set up in Graphs Option ("Do not display Cash Investment Based Graphs") and Reports Preferences (Do not display Investments with Zero Share Balance) but it's counterintuitive IMHO.

About this, I would really like to see this implementation instead :

1) The "Hidden Investments/Portfolio" option doesn't override the "Do not display Investments with Zero Share Balance". If the user has bothered to set the option in Report Preferences Windows, this has not to be disabled by another, more general, option.

2) About "Do not display Cash Investment Based Graphs", It should be the same behavior as for 1), but I suggest an evolution :

There are some investments we do not want to see as investment graphs, for several reasons (private funds, price data not available, etc...) Currently we have two choices to hide the investment graphs of these investments :

- Set the type of the investment to "Cash", and activate the option "Do not display Cash Investment Based Graphs". But the problem is these investments are not always Cash. So it's not really relevant, and there are some side-effects. Example of a side-effect : the option "Exclude Cash Type Investments" in the Distribution Summary Report preferences.

- Hide these investments and activate the option "Hidden Investments/Portfolio". But it's not the good way to do neither. If these investments are not entirely sold, we do not want to hide them.

So there should be a new option "Hide the associated investment based graphs", or something like this, we could activate for each investment, in its properties window. This would permit to exclude "chirurgically" the investments we do not want to see in graphs.
Moreover, there should be a new global menu command "Hidden Investments based graphs" that will show all graphs including those with "Hide the associated investment based graphs" ticked.


All this would make things more flexible and straightforward.

Thanks,
Djoby

[paul3nt]

Mark & Djoby & everyone:

May I make a suggestion to remedy the "Hidden/View" confusion ?

On the View menu simply place a control in a dialog with 4 toggle buttons:
1) "Hidden Attribute On / Off"; default = On;
2) "View Non-Hidden Zero Share Balances On / Off" ; default = Off;
3) "View Hidden-Non Zero Investments in Reports On/Off" ; default =Off;
4) "View Hidden- Non Zero Investments in Graphs On/ Off"; default = Off.

And eliminate all that redundant (if only partially redundant ) stuff under Options.

Won't that do it ? - - - or have I forgotten some option that logically makes sense ?

Also need a new addition to Help to explain and advise when and how to utilize all this.

Paul3NT

[Mark]

Hi Djoby and Paul3nt,

Thanks for the ideas and feedback. You have valid points. We can give this some more thought, but here are some of my thoughts currently: If "View /Hidden Investments" does not override the graph/report settings like "Do not display cash investments" and "Hide investments with zero shares", then the user has to know (or remember) about these options to make sure they go turn those off if they want to see every investment. It is helpful to have one menu command that makes sure all investments are displayed, without having to go to multiple locations and set options. The idea of having multiple "View" toggle menu items would be more flexible, but I worry that may create too many options/confusion.

Maybe adding some more text at the points where you set these graph/report specific options that indicate the "View / Hidden Investments" option overrides these settings will help eliminate some confusion.

[Djobydjoba]

Hi Mark,

I understand your point of view. You care about the possibility users could forget they have set the options "Do not display Investments with Zero Share Balance" and "Do not display Cash Investment Based Graphs", and thereby could miss some information in reports or scratch their heads to display a cash type investment graph.

Having that said, I continue to think the current behavior is not very good, as it's unusual and unintuitive a command ("Hidden Investments/Portfolio") overrides an option explicitly set by the user.

I think the following solution could do the trick and add more flexibility:

1) Move the "Do not display Investments with Zero Share Balance" option to the Report Settings window. The option would be much more visible and available for the user, as each time a report is launched the window is displayed. Moreover, this would offer more flexibility for reports. I made a request about this here : viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1177&hilit=djobydjoba

2) Create a new investment propertie: "hide investment graph", so we could select precisely the investments we want to exclude for displaying because that are not relevant and interesting for the user.
At the same time, create a new command in the View menu "Hidden graphs Investments" to toggle between "See all investment graphs" and "See all no-hidden investment graphs"

Thanks,
Djoby

[Mark]

Hi Djoby,

Thanks for the ideas. I understand your point. I view those report/graph options to not display certain investments as another form of automatically hiding investments. Normally you would want to leave the top level override off, but when you need more detail you can turn it on to override all the different ways you may have hidden some investments.

On your #2 point below, is there some reason you can't just use the regular "Hidden" attribute of an investment? That new feature sounds like the hidden attribute, but you only want it applied for graphs. I fear creating more resolution on the hiding of investments for different window types just adds to the complexity, although it would provide more flexibility.

[jjk]

I ran into this issue and found this thread when searching for a clue.

It was puzzling at first why zero balance shares were still displayed in the reports even when Option > Report Preference was set to hide them. This thread led me to View > Hidden Investments/Portfolios which indeed was checked, so unchecking it resolved the issue.

I am a fairly new user, and I don't remember turning on View > Hidden Investments/Portfolios. So, probably it was already turned on as default. The View > Hidden Investments/Portfolios option makes sense to me as designed, and I would suggest to keep it as is, but please do not check it by default when you ship the product. When it is already checked, unsuspecting users (especially new users) who want to hide zero balance investments are at a loss to know what is going on. It is caused not by the option itself, but the fact that it was turned on without his/her knowledge. So, leave it to the user to turn it on to unhide things after he/she has hidden them. And, some verbose in the Option/Report Preference menu that refers to View > Hidden Investments/Portfolios will help jog the memory if a user has forgotten about it.

[Mark]

Hi jjk,

Thanks for the feedback. I took a closer look at the default state for this option. It is turned off by default, but I think I may see how yours got turned on without you changing it. It seems all of the sample portfolios have this option turned on. This option is saved/recalled in portfolio files. If you open a sample portfolio, it will turn on this option. It will stay on until you open a different portfolio, or re-start Fund Manager. We'll plan to fix the samples so they have this option turned off to prevent this confusion.

[gmsimon]

Mark:
Can this state be made into a portfolio-specific property?Or is it already?

When I check "View/Hidden Investments/Portfolios" (turned on), it does properly hide closed investments in my 'live' portfolio - however it also hides several investments in my Watch List portfolios (which all have 0 shares owned). If I turn that property off, the investments in my Watch List show up now - but so do sold investments in my live portfolio. Am I missing something here?

Thanks.

PS - Found I can select investments in Watch List and use "Properties-Other-Hidden" to toggle & now investment shows up in Watch List when global option "View/Hidden Investments" hides closed investments. Unfortunately, had to do this one investment at a time in the Watch List (nearly 100 investments) - would still be helpful if this property were at portfolio level (rather than global) - now default used when adding new investments could be set by portfolio's property rather than a global property.

[Mark]

Hi gmsimon,

The option to display/hide hidden investments is not sub-portfolio specific, it is global as you've observed. However, you can use "File / File Operations / Hide Sold Investments..." on a specific sub-portfolio, to automatically hide/show investments in that sub-portfolio.

There are 2 ways to hide/show investments in reports. You can either set the hidden investment property, or you can use the report option to not show investments with a zero share balance. For more on this, see:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/faq_hide_sold.php

[gmsimon]

Mark: the File/File Operations/Hide... did not work for me - (the global option was set to show Hidden Investments) - it seems the global setting overrides the File/File Operations/Hide function as the investment continued to show (w/ 0 shares).

[Mark]

Hi gmsimon,

That "Hide Sold Investments..." command just turns on or off the "hidden" attribute of all the investments in the specified sub-portfolio based on your settings in this dialog. If you leave on the option to view hidden investments, all investments will always be displayed no matter what. The idea is to hide investments that you don't want to show, and leave off the option to view hidden investments. If for some reason you want to see your hidden investments, then you can turn on the option to view your hidden investments, but this is not the normal/default state to work with.