2 Category Questions on Mac

MauryJ

I'm learning a lot in my journey from Windows, but these have me stumped
1) There's waaaayyyy too many categories and it's gumming up the time it takes for me to enter transactions, especially ones with splits. I see "Remove Unused Categories" as an option. What does that do? Does it completely delete all categories not used, or just hide them?

2) I want to move a subcategory from one parent to another. There's a lot of history there. Is that possible? Merging categories seems pretty easy (highlight each and the merge button lights up), but when I try that with sub categories under different parents, the merge button is not lit. Is there a different process for this?

Jon

1. As far as I can tell it really removes them.

2. You can move subcategories to different parents, just drag the subcategory onto the new parent to move it. All the transactions using that category will automatically get updated with the change. If you want to merge two subcategories, they have to be under the same parent; if they aren't you'll have to move one of them first before merging them.

MauryJ

Wow. that is genius. Thanks so much for that answer! I moved a sub category via drag & drop to another parent category and immediately went to my register. I went back 10 years at random and it was properly categorized. It was instantaneous! If this was my Windows monster desktop I built it would have been jiggling the screen for 5 minutes, locking you out of doing anything until it finished reading and writing the file one transaction at a time. Brilliant!

As for the deletion of unused categories, I figured that was probably the case. I'm going to study that one for a while until I decide on how drastic I want to get. Really appreciate the help!