Category report - ?

My method:

Gives you all transactions in category - subtotaled by sub:category.

JM's approach sounds like the simplest way to me.

But I just wanted to clear something up. I think you made your approach more difficult than it needed to be; in effect, selecting the same categories twice. If you use the "Category Contains" box, you can leave the Quicken default category selection of *all* categories; you would not need to modify the category selection list at all.

Ahhh, that's the trick, thanks John. When I tried it, there were no category boxes checked, just used the Category Contains box.

This (and JM's approach) works great for a single category, but what if you want several categories (along with their subcategories) in the report? Guess you're then back to checking each box in the list? Seems there oughta be an option to include or exclude subcategories in this situation...

Just tried this - got a report on the selected category only, no subcategories. Then went to Customize > Categories and saw that it fills in the Category Contains box with an = sign in front of the category, which apparently eliminates the subs. Am I missing something?

I'm using QW05 - must have been a change from 04 to 05.

In 05 - looking at the Customize window - the Category and all subs are checked - nothing in the Category Contains box!!

JohnP has the solution for you.

Ok, thanks. Near as I can tell, John's solution works, but only for one category at a time...

Only suggestion I can think of - if you have a particular report with a set of categories you use frequently - memorize it. You can even add it to your tool bar.

The "Category Contains" box is more versatile than that. It may not be versatile enough to give you what you are looking for, but it can be used to capture more than one category. And if a person setup their category names with selection by common "contains" data in mind, they could select a number of categories with "Category Contains". You could select all categories starting with "A" or all categories containing the word "interest", for example. You can even use the Category Contains field to select all "transfers" by just entering a left square bracket (or *only* transfers if used in conjuction with other selection criteria).

You can also involve "Class" in report selection, which can "select" multiple categories; but I don't remember whether Q2004 offerred the separate "Class" tab (which also has a "Class Contains" box) in report Customize (as Q2005 does) or whether you had to use the "Category Contains" box for class selection.