Version 2005 is verrrry slow

How large is your file. How fast is your computer?

Interesting questions but not really relevant. His file has the same data as it did before he "upgraded" and he is running 2005 on the same computer as 2002. Why should 2005 be noticeably slower than 2002?

-- Vic Roberts Replace xxx with vdr in e-mail address.

Because software updates are like people, they get slower with age. If you expect current versions to ba as fast as older versions then I recommend never updating unless the hardware you are running the new software is also updated.

Just "because" they are updates or because new and more complex functions are added? Certainly you don't mean to say that updates of software that have no more functionality than the old version should be significantly slower. If you mean "more complex" then please tell me who QB2005 is more complex than QB2002?

-- Vic Roberts Replace xxx with vdr in e-mail address.

Because Quickbooks is full of crap and every new version has more of it. Allan is ignorant about software in general and thinks Quickbooks is a software program good enough for him to worship and he can't grasp the difference between a good software program and a substandard third-worlder-developed stupidity like Quickbooks is.

It's more complex in terms of flash and xml crap, maybe active x this or that garbage and tons of other useless IE related idiocies that they add to impress the ignorant (like you-know-who).

Racism = penultimate ignorance. Racism= snipped-for-privacy@invalid.com

I agree. Discrimination on the basis of race is ignorance.

Discrimination on the basis of economic class is exploitation, and that's what Intuit is doing in this case and that's what you are doing indirectly by casually supporting such exploitation especially when the product of this exploitation is a substandard quality software that is at least a decade behind in terms of features and usability.

QuickBooks 2005 is bigger, so it may run more slowly even if you upgrade your memory or system. It runs very slowly if you do not have much main memory, especially if you increasingly have other programs loaded while using it. My Speed Up QuickBooks page discusses this and other factors

QuickBooks is equally terrible, but each year it has apparently l>

Bigger due to tons of bloat and sloppy, unskilled programming. An average desktop in a small business nowadays can easily run complex queries on multi-GigaByte sized databases. Any slowness in Quickbooks comes from the horrid quality of its development.

Your clients (?) and you have never thought any QB upgrade was not a must upgrade. Your opinions are dismissed due to obvious bias and financial gain from pushing this crap pretending to be a quality program.

Wrong. Small business owners are ignorant of what software can or should be able to do (I'm not holding this against them of course) so when they fall in the trap of Quickbooks - which is admittedly an easy to use bookkeeping program - they are almost locked in forever into perpetual useless upgrades, horrid bloat and expensive peripheral services that don't even work as they should.

That's a $2,800 worth of unadulterated garbage. It's the same exact bad quality program with a few features that should already have been implemented in Quickbooks at least 5 years ago and, the show stopper of all, the ability to shrink a data file from 180MB down to 80MB!!

Meaning Quickbooks is such garbage that they finally decided to fix up a portion of its hideous data structure and charge the hapless $3,500 for the privilege.

The fact that you are selling it for $2,800 speaks volumes about the real worth of this piece of crap and your financial gain from drawing in a small business owner looking for a decent bookkeeping program for his/her business.

The financial benefit is not bad in and of itself of course, that's what we all do for a living. But in this case this is a substandard quality program being sold to people that don't know what they are getting into.

Utter bullshit. They have been refusing to implement a simple, straightforward data structure that will allow the addition of reporting features in the program that are found even in freeware or the cheapest of shareware utilities that can produce reports on their data.

Here's some feedback: Stop allowing any pc-farm-slave f*ck up the user interface with every new version with no supervision whatsoever and no consideration to what that does to users that have been using a certain process for years to enter data in the program.

This incompetence and ignorance is indicative of the general development (non)talent of Quickbooks and no user feedback has any chance of having any effect or cause any impovement.

Nice QB ad from a shill I'd say.

"Mike Block - QuickBooks Tax Cut C.P.A." wrote in message news:PFYXd.203$ snipped-for-privacy@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net...

See below

What affordable, complete, small business accounting program, from a well established company, meets your quality standard? I spent hundreds of hours unsuccessfully looking for one not long ago.

That is not true. I very strongly and consistently advised against QB 2000, so almost no client bought it. I also only profit from QB upgrades to the extent new versions let me do more work in less time. Some may dismiss my opinion for reasons you gave. Far more may ignore the opinion of one who does not identify himself, has no apparent credentials and offered no effective alternate.

QuickBooks just brought out a Simple Start version expressly designed & limited to first time users. Its sales dwarf new user sales of all competing programs, without benefit of lock-in.

I sell Enterprise for its $2,800 cost. Its cost for 10 users is about as much as the cost of two 5-user QuickBooks Premiers, but it has unlimited tech support. Its 100% annual sales increase reflects many switching from more expensive programs, who also are not locked in. Potential users apparently more highly value the opinion of such people and their advisors, as reflected in sales and endorsements, than they value your type of opinion. I am sorry you find this frustrating.

An unidentified person speaks of a refusal to act, but clearly has no knowledge of why Intuit acts. For facts about how hard Intuit always tries to get customer and potential customer input see the graduate business school paper and Intuit book linked to

There are good reasons why few want structure changes to add reporting features. We have had an xml interface since QB 2002 Pro. It soon led to thousands of inexpensive programs at

It is especially telling that this unidentified critic must use profanity to attack the Intuit user interface. Most users and computer professionals feel it is the best Intuit feature. Quite a few U.S. programmer proudly speak of it in their resumes. Intuit always recruits novices and PC experts for the Scott Cook invention that revolutionized the software industry. It involves highy supervised usuability tests and related reprogramming. Thousands of have seen Intuit use such tests to try to get users to break programs and show it better ways to use them. When Intuit began it took PC experts up to five hours to install competing products and print a check. Intuit did not release Quicken until usability tests and reprogramming let novices do this in 15 minutes.

Have the guts to identify yourself, post this to the AIC and see if many agree. Intuit took no action against me for twice very outspokenly boycotting it. I even pushed an Intuit boycott while Intuit CEO Steve Bennett was paying me to make QuickBooks better. He then said, "Keep raising hell when Intuit does something wrong!"

Finally, you should start learning abut what makes Intuit tick by reading the AIC, the above cited documents and this private email exchange with Scott:

From: Mike Block - Tax Cut CPA Sent: Friday, February 18, 2005 9:33 AM To: Scott Cook

Rich Walker once asked the Advisory Council for comments on one of your speeches. It was to be on something like using QuickBooks in tough times. I felt you would be more inspirational and exciting on expanding a business at such times. The accompanying survey and your recent financial results show you can now be even more exciting.

From: Cook, Scott To: Mike Block - Tax Cut CPA Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 12:13 PM

Mike, thanks for thinking of me and my fears of speaking. You're right. For me, speaking has to come from the heart of my experience...which has so much more to do with the excitement and growth that comes from inventing and delivering what changes peoples' lives for the better and forever. scott

Am I prejudiced about Intuit?

Absolutely! I am highly prejudiced about those who have done and will continue to do so much to change peoples' lives for the better and forever, especially when those people include each of the clients I am committed to serve.

Irrelevant to this discussion. I've spend quite a lot of time evaluating and using multi $$$$ packages especially for Construction too. The issue here is not how Quickbooks compares with the competition or other software in the small business market. I could easily list several advantages QB has on other very expensive packages. The issue is the quality of Quickbooks itself compared to general business software developed in the last 5-10 years.

If Quickbooks is intentionally loaded with bloat instead of useful features then its quality is substandard independently of other bookkeeping software.

OK, I remember the 2000 version and your advice against it. The 2000 version may have been the bottom of the barrel in terms of bugs and sloppy programming. I think the 2000 version or sometime very close to that release coincided with a definitive turnaround in terms of software development for Quickbooks. It was probably that time that they dumped all the code to unskilled underpaid pc-farms, but I don't know the details.

As far as effective alternate, there is one. Maybe the people who peddle Quickbooks should realize that some attention to product quality should take higher priority and offer feedback to QB in case they decide to scale back their efforts for market manipulation and put some resources into developing efficient and useful software.

The fact that the Enterprise edition shrinks a Quickbooks file from the 180MB it takes in version 2003 to 80MB for the Enterprise is clear proof of the recklessness of the software (un)develpment in Quickbooks. There are countless examples of this complete disregard to product quality which I don't have time to mention here.

I have heard of this but I have not run it so I have no opinion. It is the ancient dinosaur of Quickbooks that I am criticizing.

If I feel like it some time I may post about the sales (dis)info I got from their Enterprise dept. I know that's not their tech dept that I talked to but if their techs were doing a good job they would not have left Quickbooks in such a poor state of development.

What they did with Enterprise, as I said before, is add a couple of features that should be there 5 years ago at least in the regular versions, and fix up the horrible data access methods so that a data file does not have to be inordinately huge and a complete waste of space.

They should have done these things with regular QB versions and not charge $3,500 for a small improvement to their sheer incompetence. That's outright stealing from the unsuspecting.

Don't be sorry, these are opinions about products, don't take it personally. I see what people value every day in my work too. Most of the time the experts have all the info and they can guide their customers wherever they want to. Much more in the software area where people are still ignorant of what software is and what it can do.

How does that relate to the fact that they let an unskilled moron implement the Find window and not let it be resized? Who is leaving the PO window have the Unit column have 5 times as much width as the Description column? Even one year programming students will not do these ridiculous errors when they do rudimentary interfaces for their homework.

These details may seem trivial to some but they are not if one has to fight these stupidities all the time to enter data. In addition, this level of inattention and sloppiness is all over the program, from the seeming details of the UI to how reporting features are implemented and it would take me hours to describe all of them.

The assertion that Intuit listens to feedback is outright false. Even if they did their product is proof that they don't put any value to it.

Calling this a "complex" structure is like calling the Pinto a "complex" car compared to any recent compact sized car on the street.

If an improvement in the flat file database horrid structure they have stuck with for 10 years is a matter of debate and user feedback then they really don't know what the hell they are doing.

I am under the impression that they do know their program is crap but for market manipulation reasons they don't want to improve it. It is unlikely that they are unaware of how bad their program is.

Who decided to delete the keyboard shortcuts for the memo fields and who was the incompetent developer that did not notice this and/or gave the OK to let it go and not be corrected before release? (I think they did this after version 2001 or so).

There are dozens of obvious omissions and user un-friendly garbage they either have left unchanged or are adding with each user version.

Who decided to do the tab order in an invoice payment window or a bill window? Who ever had to first type in the due date of a bill and

It's one thing for someone to be ignorant about software and still peddle a bad quality program, it's another to be intentionally dismissive of quality issues and pass on ad copy drivel from discarded useless sub-managerial meetings.

ID-ing myself won't change the value of what I say. If they consistently decide in favor of bloat instead of fixing the program so that it does not have to refresh a report when a user changes a heading, then that level of incompetence won't change if I start calling myself any other name.

What name I use will not change the fact that up to a point a P/L report retained the same totals before and after it was broken down by Job - as it should. Some pc-farm-slave decided to change the report and now when a P/L report is broken down by Job the results are *NOT* the same with the summary report. Whoever gave the OK for this is an idiot and what I call myself on Usenet won't change that fact.

I don't think anyone did though, that's the problem. QB has no quality control whatsoever. They let anyone do anything they want to it with no consideration to the results.

Good. Now start asking questions about the usability of the program and how Quickbooks is a bad quality program because I doubt any decision maker at Intuit has ever sat down to enter 20 Purchase Orders in a row, enter 10 Customer Payments in a row, enter 25 Bills in a row with vendor credits in them, all while the phone is ringing and there is a dozen of other tasks to be done at the same time.

(Actually, the sales drone I spoke with some time ago about Master Builder told me that I should not worry that much about data entry operators because they'll figure out computer stuff on their own. That's probably the level of crap that goes on in developer meetings at Intuit.)

Further proof of their general incompetence is in the fact that some unskilled moron decided to change the bill entering process in Quickbooks and when a credit is entered, after Next is pressed, QB does not revert back to a Bill as it did from version 1 to version

Meaning, bills go to hell, reports are out of whack because the person that entered the bills was so used to pressing Next and continuing with bills that it was a second nature to them. Now she/he has to relearn a process she/he has been using for years.

I'm wasting all my time to describe an issue that is a blatantly obvious proof of the horrid product quality in Quickbooks. The fact that you don't see it too and don't mention it with each and every one of your posts and don't blast it with large blinking colored letters in a fancy animation on your site probably goes to show your pro Quickbooks bias.

You can sell it, no problem with that. I'm just pointing out its pathetically bad quality.

Good stuff for Crap File No 9.

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