OT: MS Money

I think MS is sorry they got into the financial software business. The Money product is not well supported with promotions or advertising that I see. It appears to be one of things that MS wanted to be another player and went gun-ho at the beginning. After they saw that their product was not much better than Quicken (or worse) and that users were not eager to switch for little gain (read - PITA to do so) they seemed to let it wane. However there are still lots of users and they can't really abandon them easily I suppose.

For what it is worth it did light a fire under Intuit to do a better job improving their products - in my opinion.

I used MS$ until the end of last year, MSMoney2005. When the downloads quit, I also got tired of it's increasing slowness and decided it was time to switch. I'm fairly happy with the switch to Quicken but conversion was such a PITA I ended up doing the switchover at year end instead. So I've got a lot of historical still there. I was also driven by family succession planning since the next generation uses Quicken. If I get hit by a bus, my wife is going to need the kids to help her. She's a real Luddite!

I was able to do "planning" and other tasks without the Internet connection, perhaps the newer Money does different.

Like Quicken, MSMoney will load your information onto the corresponding website but you can disable that. I find them both to be about the same, doing the same things only different approach and UI. I DO find, however that Quicken is much faster.

Still learning some of it's methods to better fit me however. Especially the quickfill on entry.

In my experience, MSMoney does a much better job at getting stock quotes in a consistent and timely manner. Not being a day trader it is not any kind of problem for me.

I had used Money 2005 for about six months. It was a resource hog on my machine, to much interaction with the web, too many ads and at the time in early 2005, the "Yodlee" interface was unreliable.

I did find Money's reporting capabilities more to my liking. I switched back to Quicken 2005 in May 2005 when my Money file became so corrupted that I couldn't fix it - even with the backups I had :(. It took me a lot of time to get my Quicken files in order.

The one other item I remember is the Money newsgroup was much more active with this one. However, I am sure they have some satisfied users.

Oilcan

Where is the Money newsgroup? I could not find it.

Jeff

Oilcan wrote:

There is a newsgroup called microsoft.public.money. You can find it on the Microsoft server (msnews.microsoft.com) if your news server does not carry it.

Hi, Jeff.

I see you are using Outlook Express 6. So, just click here:

news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.money

That will fire up OE (if it is not already running); create the News Account for the Microsoft public news server, which is free and does not require a logon; connect you to the Money NG; download the 300 newest posts; and display the newest message in the Preview Pane.

As Laura said, this is hosted on the Microsoft servers, one of more than

2,000 public newsgroups there. Since they are public, messages from these newsgroups are "slurped" by many other news servers and relayed - with any responses - back and forth to and from the subscribers of those other servers (some free, some paid, some bundled into the price of the ISP's service - like my ISP). The relay process can result in messages that are delayed or out of sequence or simply lost. So, even if the newsgroups you want are available from your ISP or another free source, it's best to connect directly to the MS servers and "cut out the middleman".

RC

Thank you very much.

Jeff

R. C. White wrote: