Quicken 10 gripes

I complained about the same thing here on 30 July 2010.¹ I've seen no change in the behavior, nor found any workaround other than to stop doing what seems natural.

Footnotes: ¹

"Steven E. Harris" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@Spindle.sehlabs.com:

I liked the old behavior best as well, wheere you'd move the cursor to the field you'd want to search for, then Ctrl-F'ed and fill in the value. Apparently that was too difficult for some ...

Here is another annoying defect: I tried to make a report regarding subscriptions, whether paid or not so I used Q10's Easy Answer report to find out how much I paid to the category "SU" (my shorthand for subscription). It printed items from every category that contained those two letters (e.g. supplies, supervision, insurance, subscription) because there are no filtering options such as "Exact" for example. It seemed to me that in years (last 15) past that there was a conduit for making suggestions about Quicken, never mind that they never paid any attention, never, never, but I don't know if such still exists. They could fix this with a patch. John Polasek

"John Polasek"

If you want to select only a single category, you should just select that specific category. There's no need for, nor meaningful use for, a filter.

But, virtually every Quicken report (including the "Itemized Category" report that is the Easy Answer report for "How much did I spend on ...") has the ability to specify "match" criteria (including "exact" matches) for text in the category (and payee, and memo) field.

On the "Categories" (and "Payees") tab in the report Customize dialog there is a "Matching" "Category contains" field. That is where you can specify category text to match.

If you were certain there was only one category starting with "su", you could use the matching criteria to select it (but see my first sentence above). You'd just enter "su.." (no quotes) in the "Matching" "Category contains" field. But that wouldn't prevent Quicken from selecting "Subscriptions" and "Submissions", if those two categories had transactions that otherwise qualified for the report.

You could use more of the category name text to qualify the selection ("subs.." would work for my previous example), but by the time you've included enough "matching" text to guarantee that only one category will be selected ... you've put yourself in the position of being no better off than just selecting the exact category.

Put another way: there is no need for an exact match on a category filter in Quicken, since you can select one-and-only-one category using the Customize dialog "Categories" list.

[The memo field, on the other hand, not having a list to select from, can make good use of an exact filter. If you wanted only transactions that had the exact text "su" in the memo field, you could select those transactions by entering "=su" (no quotes) in the "Memo contains" field.]

I selected SU. I call that a filter.

I think we're talking about two different things here. Aside from all my saved records, there is the opportunity to use quick reports.

If I select \reports\all\easy answer, what follows is quite stark: "how much do I spend on"-- enter category SU (of which more below) All that's left is to select the time span after which "show report". I cannot find any other degree of freedom in Q10.

Besides which, another unintuitive gimmick, I can enter the first initial "S" of the category SU, but if I follow it up with "U" to make SU, the entry changes to UH, the first category that begins with U! I finally begin to understand that I am permitted only to enter the initial letter and thereafter must scroll the pick list. I admit that this is good practice but it is a bit unnerving. To put it another way, it is impossible to type in the 2 letters for the category "SU". It is possible I misunderstood your advice. John Polasek

"John Polasek"

As I said in my previous reply, use the "Customize" button in the resulting report.

Yes, I see the customize button at the top of the "everything SU" report. On the next sheet I click on the categories tab and am invited to type in my category which is SU. (Now we're getting somewhere).

Whereupon it leaps to the first stop, "subscription", which happens to be an obsolete subcategory. From there on it is not apparent how to proceed except by scrolling. But I found a workaround to help with the scrolling. If you put your cursor in the category list and press "s" it jumps down to the esses, thus reducing the scroll time. But this is not a slamdunk: if the first stop happened to match an income item I would remain mired in the incomes, because the categories are arranged in a single column with incomes bunched first and then expenses beneath. This has been a problem I ve complained about from day one, Quicken apparently not having the prescience to detect that nowI'm writing a check which should automatically take me past the incomes and to the expense "cellar".

John Polasek

Perhaps they should list only the categories that match the current contents of the "Category contains" field. This might be a simple change for Intuit because it would apply to all reports that allow filtering by category - they wouldn't have to be prescient about what report the user is producing. They could do likewise for "Payee" under the Payee tab and perhaps in other places too.

"John Polasek" wrote

Or not.

As I said earlier; Quicken allows exact matches.

While I would have been content to "Clear All" categories, then just scroll down to the category I wanted to report on and select it; you could have made things much easier on yourself by leaving all categories selected and keying "=su" (no quotes) in the"Category contains" field.

I'll keep it in mind. =su; this is privileged information. It would never have occurred to me. Tashank you.