The Official Quicken Personal Finance Software Blog: Open to your checking account & Cut and Paste

June 2008

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In the last two weeks a few of the team members and I have gone to the homes of 17 people to see how they use Quicken. It is always our goal to improve this product. To do that, the best tool we have is to talk with and observe people with their own personal information at their desk (or kitchen table ;-)). This is how we can really understand what we do well, and more importantly what we don’t do well.

During those visits several of the people we talked to really wanted to do two things that Quicken could already do (but they didn’t know that). And now to my point… here is my first post with tips and tricks to getting more from Quicken.

Tip 1 (Quicken 2005 & 2006 only): Opening Quicken to your checking register – Yes I know most people go straight there so why not open Quicken directly to it. Edit menu> Preferences> Quicken Program. The first page you see is called Startup, simply select the name of the account you want to see first.

Tip 2 – Using cut & paste shortcut keys Ctrl Z/X/C/V – Very useful for me especially when I am cutting and pasting something from the web. Edit menu> Preferences> Quicken Program. Select Setup and change the Keyboard mappings to “Windows standard (Undo/Cut/Copy/Paste)

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Tip - When Quicken hangs for five minutes or more, press Ctrl+Alt+Delete keys for Windows. This should allow you press "End Task" and start over again (and again and again.)

Posted by: Tony Jacobs | August 20, 2005 at 03:40 AM

Posted by: Bart wilenski | August 23, 2005 at 08:12 PM

Hi John...

I'm not sure if you're reading the follow-up comments to your blog posts given that so many of them sound like gripes or tech support requests, but perhaps someone at Intuit will read this one. I realize this probably isn't the best place for me to post this, but your comment on "home visits" really caught my attention.

It's great to see that you guys still do home visits. I read about these in "Inside Intuit" (an awesome book, btw, and a must-read for any serious Quicken fanatic). I also read about Intuit's historical laser-focus on customer satisfaction, doing the right thing (regardless of cost even, at least way back when), etc.

I've used nearly every version of Quicken/Mac over the past 15 years, and have also participated in user studies at Intuit as well as beta tests from time to time, but over the past few years (ever since Quicken for OS X, actually), it has really seemed like this product shares little (in features, quality, or company focus) with it's Windows sibling. I then read about how Intuit had (somewhat understandably for a big company) shifted it's philosophy away from lower revenue products, and it's pretty obvious that Quicken/Mac has been a casualty of this shift. Other companies do it too, so it's hardly specific to Intuit. I totally understand the huge additional cost of developing and maintaining a Mac version of something, for a small resulting incremental increase in revenue.

In any case, Intuit seems to be trying to continue releasing annual updates to Quicken/Mac (despite user's increasing hesitance to pay the annual upgrade "tax" for releases that seem to add more new bugs than fixes for old ones or new features).

Given that I live in Sunnyvale, I hereby extend an invitation to you or anyone on the Quicken/Mac team to come over to my house to see how I (try to) use Quicken, and to understand (in your own words) "what you do well and more importantly, what you don't do well".

Just in case nobody can make it to my house, I'd be happy to come to your office or talk to anyone there via phone or email to provide sincere and useful feedback. I honestly want nothing more than to help improve Quicken/Mac. This product is so important to me and my financial life that I am more than willing to give of my limited personal time to try to help make it better.

Last year, I decided that Qucken was so important to me that I'd give the Mac fight and shift to Windows, just to be able to use the same mainstream version of Quicken that the rest of the world uses. I have a PC that I rarely use, yet I actually bought Quicken/Windows 2005. However, I promptly hit a brick wall when trying to move my 17MB of historical data over to Windows, and decided I had little choice but to stay on the Mac. (As an aside, I've read many comments from people switching from Windows to Mac who run smack into the other side of that same brick wall, with the additional point that they can't believe how different the two products are and how much they're being asked to leave behind besides their data.)

Anyway, I'd love to hear from someone, and I'm hoping that there still exists someone on the Mac team who is empowered to show the same concern for improving Quicken/Mac that seems to exist for the Windows version.

Thanks in advance,
--Steve Lemke

PS: Tell someone thanks for releasing the R3 updater for Q2005/Mac!

Posted by: Lemketron | August 25, 2005 at 12:23 PM

My previous post said pushing Ctrl+Alt+Delete keys allows Windows users to reboot when Quicken hangs. If this doesn't work, you have to reset or power-cycle your computer. (Cross your fingers for the hard-drive.) In my case, the computer couldn't reboot because it could not "end task" of the online update of my QDF file.

Gee, Steve, I guess the problem is NOT the platform...

Posted by: Tony Jacobs | September 07, 2005 at 04:40 AM

Welcome to State Farm

Posted by: Silvia R Lezcano | October 21, 2005 at 08:43 AM

Posted by: Silvia R Lezcano | October 21, 2005 at 08:45 AM

I am a new Quick Books user and was very unhappy to discover that our existing company checks will not work with the program. It appears that we have to purchase checks from Intuit!!! I believe the packaging should clearly state this -- it would have been an issue at the time of purchase.

Anybody else have this problem?

Posted by: Dicksie McDaniel | February 28, 2006 at 06:53 AM

I used to be able to download my bank statements in a QIF. The 06 version will not allow this. My bank does not offer a quicken download. What do I do?

Posted by: andy webber | March 23, 2006 at 08:02 AM

I am a current user of Quicken 2005 on a Macintosh. I am looking to learn more about some capabilities and some troubleshooting, but essentially all of the Quicken books I have found are for Windows (and as I understand it the the software for the two platforms is significantly different).

I would appreciate any reccomendations of books that are helpful for Quicken '05 on Mac.

Posted by: Dan | May 24, 2006 at 10:44 AM

Posted by: yuntrip | September 29, 2006 at 06:23 PM

Excuse, can you give me the webiste for download the Quicken 4 for windows ,this software. I can not find it .My msn ID is : shine_0212@hotmail.com

Posted by: ALEX | November 18, 2007 at 11:22 PM

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