Rubenerd

In late February I discussed finally moving off YNAB entirely and back to a LibreOffice spreadsheet that replicates a similar interface, register, and envelope system. It’s made my budget cross-platform, faster, and easier to graph and manipulate.

One other advantage I realised having a budget in this form is the ability for it to be version controlled. That way, if I make substantive functional changes, or even accrue sufficient new transactions, it can be backed up, checked out across a few machines, and restored in the event I bork something.

We are The Bork. Lower your sheilds and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technologically-borked files to our own. Your spreadsheets will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

There’s just one downside: OpenDocument spreadsheets are stored as zipped XML, so to Git and Subversion they’re binary files:

$ uname -a | cowsay
==>  ________________________________________ 
==> / FreeBSD haruhi 12.1-RELEASE-p2 FreeBSD \
==> \ 12.1-RELEASE-p2 GENERIC amd64          /
==>  ---------------------------------------- 
==>    \   ^__^
==>     \  (oo)\_______
==>        (__)\       )\/\
==>            ||----w |
==>            ||     ||

That was clearly the wrong command. Trying again:

$ git diff budget.ods
==> diff --git a/budget.ods b/budget.ods
==> index 06a7a30..8b50745 100644
==> Binary files a/budget.ods and b/budget.ods differ

Git famously handles binary files poorly; another reason I wish I’d stuck to Subversion for all my personal stuff. But LibreOffice can be told to store the file as flat XML, which can be easily diff’d:

1. Open LibreOffice, then your spreadsheet.
2. Go to File → Save As.
3. In the File type dropdown, choose Flat XML ODF Spreadsheet.

(I would hope step one and two above would be obvious, but I still get comments from people on Twitter asking why they can’t find a Mac shortcut on their Windows machine, or why freebsd-update doesn’t work on Debian. I’m sure Colin Percival would be flattered to think he’s update mechanism is so good people attempt to use it elsewhere).

Your resulting file will be significantly bigger; in my case it went from 900 KiB to just under 16 MiB. But disk space is cheap, and now you have a file any version control system can digest. That pun was top shelf.