Quicken - A Gripe (or is there a solution?)

I've not been one, historically, to sing hosannahs about Quicken's acumen when it comes their programming but I don't think they really deserve any special opprobrium for this "defect."

Users of accounting programs and programmers of accounting programs all struggle with how much time, effort and money to put into trying to "earmark" accounting entries so that every possible way you might want to slice and dice historical accounting information can be done "at the push of a button." (Man! How many times in my accounting career have I heard "Can't you just push a button and get the (report/ information) out of the computer?") The fact is there's no way anyone can anticipate *every* possible way *anyone* might want to get information out of a set of accounting records.

I guarantee you that at the biggest companies in the world with the most sophisticated and expensive accounting programs available the ol' spreadsheet get's fired up routinely so some accountant can pluck out and summarize accounting information in a way that *can't* be done via that expensive program. I'm kind of inclined to give a $40 program a "pass" on this issue since I think it would take a pretty sophisticated bit of programming to add this feature, a feature that (I'm guessing) few people would want or use. It seems like you've come up with a pretty good work-around to Quicken's "deficiency" and, offhand, I can't think of a better way to do it.

I suggest that you:

1. Make a customized portfolio view
2. Arrange the view as you want
3. Select File-Print Portfolio and Export to Tab Delimited
4. Import the file into Excel
5. Sum as wanted and print.

AMEN! Well said!

Which is why (at least for me) having Excel with its fairly rich set of tools (autofilters, sorts, Pivot charts and Pivot Tables) is such a nice thing to always be able to export to for this sort of purpose....regardless of the original source (ie: QB, Quicken, bank statements online, etc.. etc...etc...) of the data.