Memo field & reports

I assume you are asking if you can select transactions based on multiple values in their memo fields? If that is the question, the answer is "sort of". You can not *specify* two (or more)

The values in the "Matching" boxes in Quicken report customizations can be modified by what Quicken calls "filters". You can read about filters in Quicken Help (start with the Help button on the Categories tab in the Customize dialog, then I think "Categories Tab", then "limit the transactions included in a report) - from Q2005).

In your example, since both values contain common text, you could select based on those two values using what amounts to a "field contains" selection, which is the default I believe. If you entered only "Memo" in the memo matching box, Quicken would "match" to all transactions that began with the text "Memo". That would get you the values you specifically asked for in your example ... but it would also get you transactions that began with "Memo3", "Memo4", etc. and even "MemoAbcDEfg". To limit the selection to the text "Memo" followed by only a single character, you could use "==Memo?"; but even that would get not only "Memo1" and "Memo2" and "Memo3", etc., but also "MemoA", "Memob", etc.

If you wanted to select all transactions that contained the text "Memo" anywhere in the memo field, you could use the construct "..Memo..", where the two periods tell Quicken to match on any characters in those positions.

And you could tell Quicken to exclude any transactions with the text "Memo" in the memo field by specifying "~Memo".

Thanks for the information.

What is I wanted to base this field on multiple words:

John Smith and\or Bob Jones

How do I enter the syntax in the memo field?

Thanks

As I said, "You can not *specify* two (or more) *exact* matching values, ...."

A couple of other pieces of information.

If there is something that John Smith and Bob Jones have in common that other memo field contents do not have in common, you could modify your existing memo fields to prefix their names with what they have in common. Perhaps they are "friends" of yours, for example; if so, you could make the memo field say something like "Friend: John Smith" and "Friend: Bob Jones". Then you could have Quicken select transactions that have "Friend" in the memo field.

You can expand on the concept for other values/meanings in the memo field.

Also, perhaps John Smith and Bob Jones have something in common that would make them candidates to be assigned a Quicken class, which you could then append to the category for transactions for each person. Then you could select their transactions by "Class" instead of using the memo field.

Possibly significant extra work for existing transactions, but once those were modified, it would only be a small amount of work for future transactions.

Thanks for the help.

Dave