This group has helped me on a number of occasions so I thought I'd return the favor by posting what I learned about how to shrink my qph (quotes) file. I was driven to explore this because when my qph file was 3.5m, Quicken 2006 was using 100% CPU for 10 minutes after I entered each transaction before it would give me back control to enter another transaction.
After following the process below, I've shrunk my qph file to 358k and Quicken now processes each transaction immediately again. Hallelujah! I sure wish Intuit would bring back the QPH file shrinking feature I've seen mentioned in this group and remove the 1,024 symbols limit.
Here's how I shrunk my qph file in Quicken 2006:
- run Quicken, File/Export/QIF File with and only Security Lists selected, exit Quicken
- open the QIF file in Word (you can't go straight to Excel because Excel has a max of 65,536 lines); delete all the headers until you reach the first !Type:Prices line; use find/replace to delete all !Type:Prices lines and all ^ lines
- save as a CSV file (if you aren't under 65,536 lines, you'll need to save several parts as several CSV files)
- open the CSV file in Excel using only commas as delimiters (deselect quotes as text delimiters); delete any remaining !Type:Prices lines and ^ lines; delete lines where the price is blank; change price fractions (including whole numbers with spaces) to decimals, copy the date column and remove quotes and spaces and change ' to / so Excel recognizes the new date1 column as a date, create columns that extract the year and month (or week if you want more frequent quotes) from the new date1 column, write a formula to find duplicate quotes (where the symbol, year, and month/week match), delete the duplicate quotes, create a new date2 column where the date is text instead of a number formatted as a date, delete all columns except the original symbol and price columns and the new date2 column, ensure that the symbol and date data still have quotes surrounding them (may not be necessary but I was tired of trying different options)
- save as a CSV file (if you aren't under 65,536 lines, you'll need to save several parts as several CSV files)
- as a double check, open the CSV file in WordPad to ensure it looks correct (e.g. quotes are the basic quote symbol not the fancy left and right quote symbols, date is a text string not a number)
- rename or delete your original QPH file
- run Quicken, open the portfolio Investing Center, File/Import/Import Prices the CSV file
- double check everything to ensure you're comfortable moving forward with the new QPH file
David