Cartoosa, I care enough about the other posters to comment: Text statements are no longer available on the web, only html. For those customers demanding text statements I suggest you download to Word for now. In a week or two there will be a button that automates this process and saves xml statements to text with the click of a button. I'll also repeat it again: You can download the html statements into excel, word and access. I think 99% of our customers will be able to manage with the change.
The fact that IB told us on 3/29/03 that they were no longer going to provide TEXT statements after 4/30/03 does not change or diminish the problems that result for those users that require TEXT statements for their accounting software. If someone told me in advance they were going to cut off my right leg just for the heck of it, it would not lesson my problems after the event.
with reasoning power like THAT... I bet you got trading the markets down cold! IMHO, it might be yourself that you gotta work on next, bro! It's like.... not getting everythng our way all life long, is something many of us came to accept a long time ago! In fact someone well-known did a song about it... "That's Life"! I
iceman1: When I pull your chain I know I am going to get a response. Some times your response is very helpful but it has not helped this time with statement problem. Def: Thank you for you reply. You are the one IB staff member we can count on. I hope the conversion button provides a useable text statement.
Believe it or not, I spend very little time on the brokerage and over 90% of my time running our Asian trading desk. The conversion to text was not my idea nor my doing. There are many dedicated people behind the scenes busting their humps to satisfy as many clients as possible. Frankly, I find your posts offensive to those people and unproductive in your presentation. You've asked for a number of things over the years and you've rec'd most of them. In this case, the statements are easily converted to excel and ms word which can be easily converted to text. yes, it may require a little work on your end to reformat but you don't seem to grasp the big picture. Any idea how long it takes to generate tens of thousands of text statements on a daily basis? What about disk space for both html and text? What about the cost of supporting both formats, etc. etc. You might have noticed the exceptional reliability and uptime of the trading system this past year. I'd argue resources are being allocated properly.
This has to be the most bulls**t argument I have heard in a while. IB does not distribute the accounting software that you are using. It is that software publisher's responsibility to update the software to work with whatever format the broker uses to provide the statements. The Statements IB provides are meant for HUMAN readability. Just because someone wrote software to read them does not change that fact. I hardly see why IB should have to go out of the way to support them at IB's expense. If IB provided a special API for use by 3rd party software and changed it with little notice, that would be a different story. In the case of tradelog, they did update their software to work with the statements that IB now provides. I can see why def would be offended by your BS. I am offended by it and it is not even my company you are talking about.
Uncle Charlie S wouldn't let me trade for the penny a share so I'm going to stay at IB even though those html statements are a terrible offense and will take me 45 minutes a day to retype. P.S. I see I'm getting close to 777 posts, so I'll have to think up something really useful for that momentous occasion.
I believe that you are missing a key trick. Try selecting the entire .html document and copying it to the clipboard. Now paste it into Notepad and Presto - text stripped of .html markup! nitro
Gee Nitro, when did you figure this out? Something not everyone would know. I just tried it and it works great. I also did the same with WordPad and works great there also with additional tools, for formatting, editing, and printing. IB needs to get these instructions out. The instructions IB now has on their web site to save the HTML statements to MS Word just yield another HTML looking format that is as bad as the HTML statement itself. Thank You for the great information.