I am not sure which method you are referring to. I expect the commercial software some people have discussed has full instructions. Thanks to those who suggested these packages.
I currently use Excel for my record keeping. Getting the data in there is easy, manipulating it to match buys and sells is very tedious. I was hoping someone had come up with a macro to do that part.
I work from the monthly email of trade data. Highlight the section that lists the trades. Right click and "copy". Open notepad and paste the data. Save the resulting document as a text file, say Sept01.txt.
Open Excel and select "Open" from the file menu. This will take you to a browse box. Select the directory where you saved the file and highlight the file. Choose "text files" as the file type and click open. This will open a Text Import Wizard that lets you define the type of data in each column and which columns to import. I do not import the column that designates a partial fill, for example. When you have stepped through the various steps, "Finish" will result in your data being imported as a spreadsheet.
You can then match up buys and sells by cutting and pasting. When done, use "Save As..." to save the file with a spreadsheet . You have to specify this format at that time. You can then print your trades or do any spreadsheet analysis that you like on the data.