A new Activate Staged Mode function has been added for online dashboard renewal.
When Staged Mode is activated, alerts are generated much faster because chart building is skipped. You can then use the generated alerts to fine-tune your alert settings before proceeding with chart generation.
I'm excited to introduce a new floating Shortcut Menu in Personal Investor Lab, designed to make frequently used functions more accessible and improve the overall usage.
What's New
Floating Shortcut Menu
You can move the menu to any blank space which will stay there, visible while you use the add-on, reducing the need to navigate through multiple menus and making navigation more efficient.
Automatic Display
The Shortcut Menu automatically appears when you run the following function from menu:
Improved Chart Viewing Experience
The floating menu is particularly useful when viewing tickers which are not saved in the Chart sheet.
Quick Access to Post Activity
The Post Activity function is now readily available from the Shortcut Menu.
This is especially useful when updating activities that do not involve a row change will trigger renewing holdings automatically.
Summary of Benefits
This release introduces a major redesign of the dashboard renewal infrastructure, making the system more scalable and reliable, especially for portfolios with a large number of stocks.
Faster Dashboard Renewal
Building price charts is the most time-consuming part of the dashboard renewal process. To improve performance, chart generation is now more flexible.
A new Configure for user to choose whether charts are built during dashboard renewal.
When the Activity sheet has a different number of rows, or Post Activity has been executed, the next Refresh Listed Price operation will automatically switch to Renew Holding.
Levels 3 and 4 are intended for users who want to run Post Activity during every renewal. This is useful because some changes made in the Activity sheet (such as editing an existing transaction) do not change the number of rows, so they cannot be detected automatically.
If charts are not built during renewal, you can generate an individual chart at any time using the Build Chart online function for the ticker currently selected by the cursor.
Smarter Chart Generation
Chart generation is now more intelligent.
This greatly reduces renewal time while still ensuring that the most important charts are available.
Optimized for Large Portfolios
The dashboard renewal process has been further optimized and can now efficiently handle up to 100 tickers in the stock table.
Automatic Timeout Recovery
Google Apps Script limits a single execution to 6 minutes. Long-running renewals can therefore be terminated by Google's execution runtime limit.
To provide a seamless experience, Personal Investor Lab now automatically detects when execution is approaching the time limit.
Before timing out, the add-on:
The continuation trigger is scheduled:
Timeout Status
When a timeout occurs, cell A1 displays a timeout message so you know that processing has been paused.
If you prefer not to wait for the scheduled continuation, simply select Renew Dashboard again. The renewal will restore the saved state and continue immediately from where it stopped.
With all investment data stored in a spreadsheet, you can define your own custom indicators:
The Post Activity function has been enhanced to support Coverage, Payment, Premium, Earned (+/-), and Claim activities in the Activity sheet.
The Comfort Attendance add-on was published in July 2024. As of today, it has reached over 2K users
The user-customizable charts in the dashboard are refreshed for every security, which consumes part of the Google Apps Script 5-minute runtime limit. Currently, Google Apps Script does not provide a way to suspend chart refreshes during script execution.
To reduce the runtime, the add-on has been enhanced to eliminate unnecessary chart refreshes. For example, charts are no longer refreshed for securities without any alerts.
Chart_Table named range to cover all columns.
For holdings in multiple accounts, instead of breaking down the security position in individual account, the Dashboard displays consolidated security position across all accounts. The Account column shows all accounts that hold the security.
In both cases, the consolidated Bought Date is set to the earliest bought date.
Some financial institutions support automatic dividend reinvestment.
Instead of entering a separate dividend activity and a separate buy activity,
We used Pivot Expense Split during our trip to Europe, and it worked really well for handling multi-currency expenses across different accounts and account with multiple currencies like HSBC One.
For each transaction, I simply select the account, local currency, and amount. If the transaction is settled in a different account currency, I choose the “Settle on currency” option.
The transaction is then recorded in the Journal sheet using Google’s exchange rate and automatically split into the Split sheet. Once the bank posts the transaction, I update the Journal and can run the Resplit function if needed.
For entries in the “Split among” field that are settled in another currency, any specified amounts are automatically converted.
For example, an amount of 18.9 in the split (EUR) will be converted to 30.19 CAD for Peter and the rest of CAD to Mary during splitting.
You can change the header task name and color to what you prefer.
Please follow the steps below:
1. From the menu Extensions > To-do List Plugin, click “Unplug.”
3. From the menu Extensions > To-do List Plugin, click “Plug in.
For one-time attendance where the column header does not contain a date, you can enter the column header in the configuration as shown below:
Your alerts and chart images are now automatically saved in the new Charts tab when you renew the dashboard — making it easier than ever to track and review your investment insights. The Dashboard buy and sell alerts have been linked to the charts.
When the number of attendees exceeds 100 and linked/associated attendees are displayed horizontally, the table can become quite large. On some mobile devices, this may temporarily freeze the page and require a double tap to resume interaction.
The web app has been enhanced to improve usability and performance:
A- / A+ controls are now available to zoom out and zoom in the attendee table smoothly.
Linked attendees are displayed only when an attendee is clicked, reducing initial layout complexity and improving responsiveness.
These improvements help maintain smooth interaction and better performance, especially on mobile devices with large attendance lists.
