HI, I added the description column in transactions where I added in new descriptions in the “autocat” tab to replace the descriptions in the transaction tabs.
My question is, once you run “autocat” and it replaces the descriptions, is there a way to revert to original description OR update the description with new rules.
As it stands now, it appears that this only works once and you can not revert back to the original description if you remove or change the description in autocat.
@nuye, there isn’t a way to revert back. You could change the rule to use “Description contains” and the new description, and then reset the Description override column in the AutoCat sheet to be whatever new description you want to use and I think that would work.
The original description is retained in a separate column called “Full description” that’s out to the right also as a way to revert, but I don’t think it would be easy to automate this.
Thank you. So could I just delete the description in transaction and re-run autocat? I wasn’t sure how this worked so wanted to play around with difference descriptions so didn’t realize it was a “final” description given everything else can be modified with auto rule updates.
@nuye, if the description information is missing then the AutoCat rule won’t have anything to check on so I don’t think deleting it and then re-running it will work.
Let’s say your original description was “Lowe’s store #123” and you wan’t it to just say “Lowe’s”
Your Description Contains rule had “Lowe’s” and your Description column in AutoCat was set to “Lowe’s” - essentially you’re just trying to remove the “Store #123” part - you could adjust those to have the Description column set to “Lowe’s Hardware” and then every instance of “Lowe’s” should update to “Lowe’s Hardware” in the Description column on the Transactions sheet.
I’m not sure what your use case is here.
The other option would be to copy/paste the full description data into the Description column and try again.
I know this is an old thread but for those trying to figure out a solution for this in 2022 it’s pretty simple (I am not sure if this feature was available in 2020 when this post was created). So to address the issue @nuye was facing…
Instead of using Description Contains, create a new column called Full Description Contains in the AutoCat sheet. This will searching Full Description but still replace Description. If you make a mistake you can re-run your original search based on Full Description in your Transactions sheet.