Whether you're managing your personal finances, investing for your future, or running a small business - or all three - there's a Quicken product that's right for you. Quicken 2005 for Windows includes over 100 customer-driven enhancements that allow you to accomplish what you need with a lot less work. Plus, save $10 when you order online!.
| SUMMARY |
| 0% |
Percentage of reviewers who would recommend this product to others |
| 3 out of 10 |
Average User Rating |
| 1 |
Number of Reviews |
| OVERALL RATING |
COMMENTS |
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3 |
Anonymous
11/17/2003 5:55:43 AM
From my experience with upgrading to Quicken 2003 (on Windows 98 SE), I have become disenchanted with this product. While my experience is only with versions 2003 and earlier, their response to my complaints does not lead me to expect improvement in 2004. Through the years Intuit has added more bells and whistles, made the product fancier, but at the expense of making it less usable. Worse still they have neglected to fix some nasty flaws in previously existing features.
When I upgraded to 2003, I immediately lost the ability to do transaction downloads in the background while I use other Quicken features. This is not a "bug" ; once you careful study their web based support material or start using the upgrade you find that transaction downloads in the background are no longer an option! Furthermore, if you use another program while Quicken downloads transactions, because every time it finishes one step, the Quicken download pops into the foreground.
The new interface for reports is awkward and confusing. If you try to change the customization of a saved report, it insists on making a "new version" of the report instead of replacing the existing one. While this in many cases is a useful feature, your "saved report" ends up as the original with a clutter of re-customized reports. Supposedly you can disable this feature, but my attempts have failed.
Furthermore, there are glitches in the reports' interface with Microsoft's windowing system. In Windows 98 SE, Quicken frequently appears to lock up when Customizing reports because the customization window becomes invisible. Hitting the enter key the correct number of times will step you through the invisible options and often get you out of the customize mode. If you don't recognize that this is happening, you must kill Quicken with the task manager and restart it.
Finally, most annoying, Quicken has serious difficulties matching transactions from web-enabled downloads. With some institutions, transactions are rarely matched with any hand entries made in the register. This means you must manually match or delete the downloaded transaction.
Worse still, with other accounts, Quicken 2003 will match a downloaded transaction from 2003 with a manual entry from years ago as a "near match." In these situations the "unmatch" function does not appear in the menu. If the transaction is accidentally accepted, instead of deleted and manually entered, you will have fun sorting through back statements to get your position correct. DejaNews users detail this problem in posts from as far back as 1999.
To add insult to injury Intuit refuses to acknowledge this as a bug in my correspondence through the Tuscon BBB (after Intuit refused to acknowledge other communications). They maintain the function is working as designed! Their attempt at rectifying my complaint was to offer me the opportunity to pay to speak with one of their technicians! A non technical person called me from Intuit's President's office and explained this to me. She refused an offer for me to step through this issue with their technician (except through their normal "pay for advice" line) to demonstrate that the problem was not merely an issue of the institution using duplicate transaction IDs.
If you think my ranting is unreasonable, Microsoft Money's reviews prove that one can write a personal finance program that will not anger as many users! My next upgrade may be to Money!
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