General discussion

- deleted because the problem was solved. One of the imported variables crashed IDEA every time.
Anyway I want to thank you, Brian for setting up this site. It helped me out a lot. Please keep it up.

Good afternoon, Brian. I am a forensic accountant with a large CPA firm. I have been given IDEA as a tool for use in an investigation that involves 10s of thousands of documents. This matter will be going to court, and I would like to be able to pull various PDF documents up on a screen as necessary in the evidence phase. Is IDEA able to embed PDF files so that they can be accessed in their original condition and called up on the screen? If not, what complementary application would be required to accomplish this? My compliments on the quality of your site.

This script will allow you to add a prefix or a suffix to all your field names.  This is great when performing a join or Visual Connector and don't want the entire file name to be included.

http://ideascripting.com/ideascript/add-prefix-suffix-field-names

Hi Brian,
I want append a column name with its tagged field name. But while am appending this through script. Its appending with each row value.
eg: if tagged field name is "CF". Then I need to append a new column with "CF". 

This script will add a total field to the file and you can either create a running total on the entire file or on a combination of up to 8 different fields.

http://ideascripting.com/ideascript/add-totals-column

Just added a new script.  This one will be handy when you are performing appends.  The script will compare the primary file with all the append files and generate a report of any append fields in the that are different from the primary file but with the same file name.  These will need to be changed before the append can be run successfully.

http://ideascripting.com/ideascript/append-file-report

Nice article about using IDEA date functions for fraud investigations.

https://www.themis-analyticstraining.com/idea-date-functions/

As you may or may not know, with version 10.3 of IDEA you can now create projects and custom functions in Python.  I have just added a section to the forums on anything that is Python related.  I am trying to learn the language now as it has great potential for IDEA.  There are already a few downloads related to Python in the IDEA Lab section of the site.

I also have a few videos (pretty basic so far) on my YouTube channel about using Python with IDEA.

Hopefully we can start having discussions about this language.

Hi Brian,
Is it possible to create a database with one row with blank/zero data with some column names.
Can we create a blank database using scripts.
Best Regards,
Jiyaji

I just posted a template that you can use to start writing your scripts.  It has a menu with a file selection and one field selection from a download.

Enjoy.

http://ideascripting.com/ideascript/template