Mac Quicken 2007 observations. 15 Nov 2008
[let me know if I'm wrong with any of these observations. I'm new to Quicken but all this is based on my actual experience so far].
o When a file is opened, there doesn't appear to be a way to inquire what file it is. It opens the last file opened, but you may not know which one that is. The file name should be displayed in a menu line or somewhere.
o File -> Close - would be a good addition as it doesn't exist. To close a file and open another one you File -> Open and assume the one you were in is now closed (or with Quicken not running, double click on a .qdfm file). I find this odd because many programs allow you to open multiple files (e.g. OpenOffice) and lets you obviously select which one you are working on.
o Historical Quote downloads are not robust. e.g. AAPL will NOT get a 5 year archive (for me and Quicken support confirms that too) it only seems to get 5 quotes! And this has been observed for INTC and COMPX but only intermittently!! (seems like a serious bug). [When this happens to me now, I go to Google Financial, the stock, click on 5 years, click on download csv, and then massage it with an emacs macro to put it in proper qif format, and import it into my Quicken stock file].
o There isn't an obvious way to re-reconcile an account. i.e. clear "R" from transactions so you can start over if you add older transactions, edit some reconciled transactions, etc. It turns out not to be difficult, but seems to be undocumented, or at least obscure, so it was not obvious at first. The way I found was to get to the window that lists all reconciliations by date (which I only arrived at intermittently, I'm not sure how to just open that) and select one. Now the non-obvious thing because there is no delete button in the window, but if you go to the main window with one selected, click on "Edit" at the top of that window, there is a "delete reconciliation" (or something like that) and it will delete that reconciliation and remove the R's from the relevant entries, and NOT otherwise disturb the transactions. This was far from obvious to me. I just tripped on it.
There should be a button that allows you to wholesale (or by a date window) clear "R" and "C" (other?) Clr codes. I don't care if there are three or four "Are you sure you want to do this?" buttons to click through, sometimes it is necessary to save the end user hours of their time. (i.e. me).
o when reconciling, there is a "clear all" but no "check all" transactions as being cleared in this version. That would be helpful when one wants to do an initial first reconcile with hundreds (or more) of transactions.
o There is no printed book on the Mac version that one can purchase. That I've found, anyway. I have several on the Windows version. I eventually had to print out the 477 page guide from the program itself to get Mac specific documentation I could easily read, study, and refer to.
o Buried in that documentation is a "re-indexing" commmand (Option-Command-B) that is recommended before any exports, to fix file problems, etc. I only found that in the manual, I don't see any menu item to do it that makes it obvious. So it seems it is slightly hidden from the user unless they study the manual. That doesn't seem right to me.
o The re-index command often results in a program crash immediately after doing the re-indexing. Not good. e.g. a re-index, File -> Backup to Disk often (always?) crashes the program. As far as I can tell, nothing gets lost when it is reopened, but how would I know for sure?