Calendar Tool

The Calendar tool has been extended quite a lot in recent version 10.x releases, to provide even more practical features. This tool, basically takes the form of a Bank selector and a Calendar, from where to navigate in time and select the exchange rates to load. It also displays the list of contained values and important information such as file name, base currency and date, as you can see on the image below.

Calendar years menu

But behind this apparent simplicity lies a powerful tool that helps users manage the Historical Series of any publication up to 1999. Regardless of the original file format, the foxer plug-in framework takes care of all the details, retrieving successfully any data from CSV and XLSX files, HTML pages, HTML queries, XML and JSON documents.

On the image, you can see Years navigation menu and value comparison in action.

Why Historical Series are important?

foxer currency calculator has been designed to get daily updates from an unlimited set of Financial Institutions. This means that the application must be running in the background during part of a regular working day, because the publications are collected from all over the world: Australia (UTC+10) to Canada (UTC-5).

Of course you don’t have to keep your computer running all the day. Daily publications are kept till they are replaced, so you have up to 24 hours (depending respective client and server locations) to get your updates.

But in case you are in holidays or turn your computer off for days, Historical Series ensures that you can still get all this precious information.

On the other hand, not all Institutions publish an Historical File. Bank of China (BOC) and The South Africa Reserve Bank (SAR), for instance, they don’t. And this means that if you can’t get the update during the 24-hour window that it’s available, there will be no way to get that particular file.

Finally, it should be noted that some publications doesn’t offer a physical Historical File, but they allow to get queried for particular dates. In this case, the historical series are considered “On Demand” and foxer tries to get all the missing files by querying the Institution’s server instead of parsing a local file.

How to manage Historical Series

The (History) label appears automatically when, in the Month view, you select an empty date from the past. It can get Yellow, meaning that the information is currently available, or in Red if the local series stored in your computer doesn’t reach that date, and so is necessary to update it before proceeding.

When you click on the (History) label, and depending on the retrieving system, you will be informed about how many files can get retrieved and asked to proceed, or the On Demand Window will appear, starting to query for all past missing dates of the month.

Depending on the Central Bank selected, Historical Series are available from just a year up to 1999. It should be noted that the further you go back in time, the more chances are that couldn’t retrieve all currencies expected. Normally, this is because they simply didn’t exist at that moment, so you will get a warning, and the list of unavailable currencies will get reflected in the log.

Finally, you should know that you can safely delete a single day or the complete month to force Historical series to re-extract files. Files are never physically deleted, but renamed to .bak. Recovering this files is always available unless a replacing .fxr formal file is found.

Time Navigation

The Calendar has two views: the Year view and the Month View. You can change between them by clicking on the Month Caption or by right clicking on the calendar grid to get the menu.

Years Menu

A very practical way to directly jump to a desired year is located on the header of the calendar. If you right click on this area you will get a list of all years available. Years with data already extracted are shown in orange. By clicking on the desired year, the Calendar changes to Year view, so you can select a month. Months with data are shown in orange, too. When you select a month, the Calendar will change to Month view, and if missing days are available, the (History) label will get visible.

You can find a list of time navigation hot keys available at the end of this page.

Values list

The values panel, by default display a list of the selected date currencies and respective values. But its contents is mainly controlled by the check box labelled “Show internal values”:

• When unchecked you see a numeric representation formatted as following your locale settings.
• When checked, what you get is the original text as it was obtained from the publication.

Exchange rates are worldwide expressed in some different ways, and sometimes not in a consistent way even in the same file. So we think it would be useful for users to see what’s the original source of the values being used.

Values list menu

Values menu

The values list, also provides a very interesting menu, from where you can copy the contents to the clipboard. Formatted as a simple table, as a Microsoft Excel formulas, as a Cross Table, or even to launch a Base currency check against all values provided.

If you need a solid prove to trust foxer currency calculator capabilities and accuracy, there is no better way than to CTRL+click on this option for all Banks available. As Base currency is 1 against itself by definition, and because all currency values provided are the equivalent to 1 base currency units, you will see that in all cases the resulting value is 1.

Please realize that all of these options depend on the number of decimals selected.

% Currency variations

Just over the values list you can also get the % variation of a currency with respect to another date from the Calendar. To do this, just select a currency in the values list of a file already in memory, and click on a different date.

Please note that variation percentage shown is always calculated following the natural time flow.

Buttons

Click on Update or Update All to request an instant update for all subscriptions or currently selected only.

Click on View Source to check current subscription publication in a browser. Please note that the page requested can be different if Show Internal Values is checked or not.

Click on the Apply button or double click on a cell to load exchange rates from the selected date.

Icons and labels

foxer icon opens main Converter window. Right click to open Configuration window.

Click on Today’s date to make calendar to move to current date.

Click on Current file label to navigate to current in memory exchange rates date.

Click on History to extract missing files from the Historical series (if available).

Hot Keys

Left / Right moves selected date to previous / following day.

Up / Down moves selected date to previous / following week.

Page Up moves Calendar to next month. Ctrl + Page Up moves 1 year.

Page Down moves Calendar to previous month. Ctrl + Page Down moves to previous year and month.

Ctrl + W toggles from Month View to Year View and back.

Press Esc key twice to close the Calendar window.