Attachments a good thing?

I'm using it. For me, its value will be in the future, when I need to quickly locate a bill or bank statement. I will search Quicken, and I find the entry I need, the invoice will be attached. Same for bank statements. I had already gone paperless by scanning everything I don't receive electronically, and this is a natural extension of that process. Just curious, though, what advantages do you see in using Q2003 over using Q2006?

I have a follow-up question to the original poster's question:

I just upgraded to Quicken Deluxe 2006 (from 2005). In the box, there's an offer for software called "Snag-It" -- a screen-capture utility. It says that it can be used from within Quicken to "easily" keep a record of electronic checks, etc.

Does this software really enhance this new "attachments" function? If so, how? How does it differ from the "default" capability of Quicken? I was just wondering whether anyone is actually using it.

Thanks.

There isn't any built-in link AFAIK, between Snag-It and Q06. The offer you see is a discount in the price you pay for Snag-It. It's a good price. It's a *GREAT* screen capture program. However, if you already have a program for doing screen captures that you like, there's no real advantage to buying this (other than the fact, IMNSHO, that it blows the socks off of any other one I've looked at).

I get the utility of it. But, given the frequency with which I need to look at old statements -- which is "almost never" -- I'm not sure it's worth the labor. The process of doing the attachments looks laborious.

Well, for one thing, in Q2006 they trashed the display of investment-account registers.

For example, for a "DivX" transaction in "one line" mode, on my super-wide monitor, I now get to see:

the date "DivX" A truncated version of the security name (11 characters' worth) A =negative= transaction value, in red A really really wide white space with nothing more in it.

In "two line" mode, I get the above, plus:

A truncated version of the "memo" field (9 characters' worth) The name of the transfer account An additional really wide white space with nothing more in it.

Not good. In '03 I could see the whole security name, the whole memo, and DivX's were displayed as if they were income :). I don't know what in the world the engineering department was thinking about. If anything.

A lesser example: all the registers are displayed now as slightly-dark gray text on a slightly-lighter gray or pastel background. Used to be black-on-pastel. No, it's not adjustable. For those of us who are getting older, gray-on-gray is a Bad Choice.

Meanwhile, I'm having trouble finding any improvements since '03, except for the attachments feature and the memorized-transaction bug fix.

I'd like my accounts to be readable...

Garry

Have a look at it. There's a free-trial download at

What I see is a really cool, flexible screen-capture program. But what I don't really see how that helps with anything -- my electronic statements and images are all web-based. It's far easier to right-click on a web image and do "Save As", than to go into a separate screen-capture program, capture, and do the Save-As from there. And in the rare case that I'd be scanning a paper statement in, the scan program will of course save it as a file. In my many years of working on Windows machines, it's been =very= rare that I needed to do a screen capture.

Now, if SnagIt had some means of talking to Quicken without going through the "save as" step, =that= would be good.

Or, if the Quicken engineers had allowed us to cut-and-paste a captured image in, =that= would be good.

But: no such luck, that I can see.

Garry

This was incorrect information. The switch to turn off the graying is at Edit / Preferences / Quicken Program / Register / "Gray reconciled transactions".

(Yah, I'm still evaluating Q2006. No, I haven't found a way yet to make the investment registers legible again. But, haven't run into any other problems.)

Garry

i wonder if I am better justing storing electronic versions of receipts in a separate folder, perhaps by year and category, as opposed to putting them into quicken. I still worry about file size, and the associated files for the attachments. Can someone comment about whether they see a benefit having the electronic receipts within quicken, versus separately.

alan

See my two posts of Nov 29 in the thread with subject "Maximum Quicken 2006 file size?" Quicken's data file doesn't increase or decrease one bit for each attachment.

If you can find a way to link the files between where you store your records and quicken wants to store the attachments, all you going to use is (lots of) inodes from the file system, but no additional storage.

-- HASM

Below is a Perl script to automate the above. Works if the files are on a file system that supports hard and symbolic links, i.e. all modern Unix OS. May work on WinXP (I was able to run "ln" and "ln -s" under cygwin, but don't have Perl installed).

-- HASM

#!/usr/bin/perl # # IF: # - you keep all your downloaded PDF, HTML, etc, bills, check images, # and other financial stuff under one directory, # - want to attach them to Quicken 2006, want to keep the original # file structure, and don't want to duplicate the storage, # - store the files in a file system that supports hard and symbolic # links (that's the catch, works for me). # THEN: # - customize the "records" and "attachments" paths below, # - attach at will using Quicken, # - run this script from the command line after adding any attachment, # as many times as you want. # # All files under the Quicken attach folders will be replaced with # hard links. # All web files you point to, that have a _files sub-directory # associated with it, as Mozilla/Firefox saves web page complete # structures, will be added as symbolic links. # # Run with -d for preview. # # © 2006 HASM # # Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its # documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, # provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that # both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in # supporting documentation. #

use File::Find; use File::stat; use Digest::MD5; use Getopt::Std;

use strict;

# customize this to point to the folder where you keep all your bills, # PDFs, web pages, check images, etc. my $records = "/path/to/records/directory";

# replace "/path/to/quicken" to point to QDIR # replace "datafile" with the name of your Quicken datafile my $attachments = "/path/to/quicken/attach/datafile/txn";

# run with "-d" for preview my %opts; getopts ('d', \%opts) || die "usage: $0 [-d]";

sub hash { open (FILE, $_[0]); binmode (FILE); my $digest = Digest::MD5->new->addfile(*FILE)->b64digest; close (FILE); return $digest; }

my %files;

sub wanted { $files{stat($_)->size,hash($_)} = $File::Find::name if -f $_; }

chdir $records || die "$0: records directory ($records) doesn't exist"; find (\&wanted, $records);

chdir ($attachments) || die "$0: attachments directory ($attachments) doesn't exist";

foreach my $dir (glob ("*")) { chdir ($dir); foreach my $file (glob ("*")) { my $stat = lstat($file); my $size = $stat->size; if (-f $file) { my $digest = hash ($file); if (exists $files{$size,$digest}) { my $link = $files{$size,$digest}; if (! -l $file && $stat->nlink < 2) { if ($opts{'d'}) { print "unlink $dir/$file\n"; print "link $link $dir/$file\n"; } else { unlink $file; link $link, $file; } } if ($file =~ /.*\.html?/) { my ($subdir) = ($link =~ /(.*)\.html?/); $subdir .= "_files"; my ($basename) = ($subdir =~ /.*\/([^\/]*$)/); if (stat ($subdir) && !stat ($basename)) { if ($opts{'d'}) { print "unlink $dir/$basename\n"; print "symlink $subdir $dir/$basename\n"; } else { unlink $basename; # basename may not really exist symlink $subdir, $basename; } } } } } } chdir (".."); }