Mac users need to purchase Quicken for Mac. The best let you track your performance and compare your portfolio with the market. If investment tracking isn’t what you need, you can find a lower-cost program with the budgeting features you’re looking for.
I have resisted upgrading to Quicken's newer versions, but this one came free with this year's TurboTax, so I tried it. It deletes all previous versions of Quicken and then does not recognize the passwords on past Qdata files, forcing you to lose the independence of maintaining those files on your own computer. If you wish to maintain your own Qdata files on your own computer, DON'T BUY or INSTALL THIS SOFTWARE! They are essentially doing the same thing that on-line hackers do when forcing you to pay them to have access to your own data. Keep your old off-line Quicken program and data files. This software is essentially a blackmail system. Have been a Quicken user for a long time and i am tired of being their beta tester.
They release software before it is ready and there are always bugs that take months to work out, Home and Business 2013 is on its 12th release and 2014 has only been out two days and it is already on release 2. Downloaded the program, installed it and all went ok but on first use the conversion failed three times and the program stopped every time. Some how after restarts etc it was able to complete.
Now I have problems with categories no longer matching saved transactions, duplicate transactions after download, the display hangs when switching between registers and i have only used it once so i am sure there are more to come. My recommendation to everyone is wait until the 6th or 7th release because that is when Intuit BEGINS to get. I have been using Quicken since the DOS days. The more I use Quicken 2018, the more bugs I find.
I run Windows 7, arguably the most stable OS MS ever produced, and a Dell Latitude i5 laptop that is rock solid. I've never used a program that has more bugs in it than Quicken 2018. I was so hoping for improvement now that Quicken separated from Intuit. Not happening.
Here's a sample of some of the bugs that come to mind readily: 1. The account download locks up periodically. The program becomes 'unresponsive' and must be killed using Task Manager. The data transfer from my old version (Quicken 2015) didn't work correctly so my Bill Pay module is now missing many monthly bills.
I used to rely on this feature heavily. The Bill Pay section is. Not sure what difficulties some people are having, but my transition to 2019 was smooth. Only issue was that I had to physically go into the 'computer registry' to remove left behind files from my 2016version. I thought that CCleaner should have wiped it, but didn't. Once I finished that, clear sailing with install and import of my most recent backup.
Thus far (still exploring) I'm very pleased with the format and abilities available to tweak how Quicken operates with my banks and investment companies. At this point based on my experience I'd give Quicken an A+, and as for the ongoing yearly subscription fee, look around, that's the way most main stream software companies are operating. This version is just Quicken 2015 with a new version slapped on. It should just be a free upgrade to all existing customers that have put up with the degrading quality of this software over the past 10 years or so. But here's my review anyway: Quicken 2016 fresh out of the box is much better than Quicken 2015 was at this time last year. It was so bad that I swore this year I would wait at least a month before upgrading.
But, I have been using Quicken since the early 90's and since I have backups and multiple computers I figured, what's the worse that can happen? Unable to resist, I went ahead and did the download and upgraded. I am still running Windows 7, so I can't yet speak to Windows 10 yet, although I will try it soon. I have only seen one glitch so far and that. Yesterday, after a number of reminders that Quicken Essentials for Mac was no longer supported, and I could not pass up $40 off, I down loaded Quicken 2016 fro Mac, from Intuit.
The install went fast. Started it up for the first time, and it updated to the new patch version. Once that was done, it asked me to import my data, going back to the early 1990s; 5 minutes later, it was all there. All balances checked out, all accounts were there. I was ready to go.
Only one thing I had to do, was adjust what was displayed, on the registers, to shorten the time periods from all transactions, to a month, or quarter; that was quick. Also, I wanted to see more transactions, so I selected Compress for the register format. I explored it a little and it seem to function very well. It was quick. As usual the software presents an easy way to understand and do wills and other legal documents for yourself and family members. Just answer most of the questions asked by the program and a few clicks of the mouse and you're done. I gave it 4 stars because we also own the 2014 version of the program and it came with a very in depth book explaining a lot of the terms we really didn't know a lot about; like probate, power of attorney, wills (of course), health care directives etc.
The 2018 version did not have the book and costs more than the 2014 method. Still it fit our needs and we went through the will rather quickly and had 2 witnesses sigh and date the paperwork to make it legal. All the estate planning software is on the disk and can be read on the computer from the. Well this isn't going to be a traditional review. Year after year people complain about software and then when it comes time to decide to buy a product all they want to hear about is the new features, and then they wonder why companies spend their time putting features instead of fixing bugs.
For the first time in years, Quicken 2015 has two 'main' new features, that are not subject to crashing Quicken, like most of the major ones of the past. Their approach this year has been more about fixing bugs, and that is what I care about.
And in this vane I'm going to mention a few of the ones I find important over Quicken 2014. 1) Transfers from IRA/401K accounts now work properly, and can be deleted. 2) Quicken 2015 now works properly with Windows scaling (also known as the DPI setting), with the exception of the.
I have been using Intuit’s Quicken program for more than 18 years to track my spending, chart investments, and keep tabs on my somewhat haphazard financial life. During those years, I’ve run into my fair share of Quicken bugs, and I’ve adopted a series of measures for protecting myself.
For example, I make a backup every three days, I keep backups for three years, and I start a new Quicken file every year on January 1. Despite these measures, because I use Quicken to track every single purchase I make for myself, my wife, or my children, my Quicken files quickly grow to thousands of transactions. Intuit tells me my files are significantly larger than most users’. Anyway, things went south on December 28 when I was adding a new checking account to my Quicken file.
A few clicks into this setup, the program displayed an error message–Error Code 7097–and crashed. This is a frightening error message–it’s always frightening when your financial records may be corrupted–but I wasn’t worried because I have all those backups. Yet much to my surprise, when I tried to open my backup files, they generated the same internal error! P=”” / I thought that my copy of Quicken might be broken, so I started the program while holding down the control key to prevent Quicken from opening my old, corrupt file. I then created a new Quicken file, put some transactions in it, and tried to validate it using the program’s built-in file-recovery tools. No problems there.
So then I tried to validate my primary file. Bad news: it wouldn’t validate. It also wouldn’t “super validate,” a secret validation command that Quicken can run if you run the “validate” command while holding down the shift and control keys. Never one to panic about such a thing, I set up a new computer running Windows 2000 with the Parallels virtual machine system running on a Macintosh. I then downloaded a pristine copy of Quicken 2007 for Home and Business, copied over my primary file, and tried to open it.
Nope, that didn’t work. Strangely enough, the new install wouldn’t read any of my backups either. I kept getting that pesky internal error. A Web search for the error code was not useful: a few other users had run into this error code, it wasn’t documented, and when they called up Intuit, they didn’t get any help. A bit more searching through Intuit’s website revealed that the company sells a “data recovery service” to recover information from corrupt Quicken files.
Intuit does offer support on Quicken, so I blocked out three hours this morning for an extended call with its tech-support center located in New Deli. I got a very polite service representative who was clearly hamstrung by the tools that Intuit had given him: his documentation didn’t explain what Error Code 7097 was, either.
All he could tell me to do was uninstall Quicken from my computer, download a new copy, install it in a new directory, and try to open the file. It was clear that he was following a script. I didn’t think that this would work, but I decided to give it a try just the same.
As it turns out, I was using Quicken 2007 R2, and when I tried to do the reinstall, the program told me that R3 was now available. I installed R3 and opened my old file, and it all worked! Happy, I said good-bye to the nice fellow in New Deli And then Quicken R3 crashed. I ran Quicken R3 again and it worked for a while, but then it crashed.
I tried validating the file, and errors were found and fixed. The new file worked for a while, but then it crashed again. So here’s what I’ve done: I’ve managed to get R3 to run long enough to export all of my transactions to a QIF file. I’ve imported those into a new file, and–hopefully–I’ll be able to recover enough information to file my 2006 taxes. In the meantime, I’m moving to Quicken for Macintosh. Years ago I had a friend who worked at Intuit on both the Windows and Macintosh programs.
He told me that the Windows code base was a mess–in particular, he said, there were problems with the internal database that Quicken for Windows used. My friend told me that the Mac team had thrown away most of the code and started over, but that the Windows people never had the chance to go back and fix it because they were always struggling to get out the next annual release. My friend quit his job at Intuit back in 1995. Since then, the Windows program has gone through ten annual releases.
Each release has added features and complexity. But fundamental problems in Quicken for Windows have remained. For example, the Windows version unnecessarily redraws lines in the check register multiple times when a user is moving from transaction to transaction–something that’s obvious when you run the program using Microsoft Remote Desktop. Even more annoying, the program slows down my computer even when it’s running in the background.
For years I’ve wanted to switch from Quicken for Windows back to Quicken for the Macintosh, but I’ve stayed on Windows because the Windows Home and Business version offered invoicing and because my bank only offers direct download on the Windows platform, and not on the Macintosh. (Why not on Mac? My bank told me that it’s because Intuit charges tens of thousands of dollars a year to enable the feature, and only a few people were requesting it.) These problems have finally pushed me back. I’ll figure out some other way to do my invoicing, and I’ll download my bank transactions using Web Connect instead of OFX. Frankly, it’s outrageous that Quicken on Windows generates undocumented error codes that not even Intuit’s own tech-support people understand. It’s personally annoying to me that features I want–like invoicing and OFX download from my bank–are only available on Windows. It’s a sad comment on the software industry that Intuit’s programmers are so focused on adding new features that they can’t go back and fix the underlying quality of the company’s mainstay product.
There are alternatives to Quicken, of course. The last time I tried Microsoft Money it crashed on me, and it only runs on Windows. But the Open Source movement has created GnuCash, KMyMoney, and jGnash; there’s also Moneydance, which costs $29.99 and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. The problem with any of these systems is that I won’t get support from my bank or brokerage house if I ever have problems downloading online transactions. Nevertheless, perhaps it’s time to switch more than just my platform.
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