Recommendations for reducing file size

Just leave the data in your Quicken files. Size never hurt anyone - yet.

Max what I do every few years is start a new account and enter in only the equties that I own at that time. For example is I happen to own

This approach would not be enjoyable to execute if a person has several drip accounts.

I did this to clear out all the garbage I had been >Dear Group,

SPAM has driven me to Spoof my email, sorry

What is motivating you to want to reduce the size? Many of us go back further and have files sizes in excess of 20MB and really don't experience any problems.....

One thing that sometimes works to reduce the size is to copy the account using the Quicken menus. If there is any empty space, it may compact it and reduce it somewhat...

I am a long time quicken user (10 yrs +). My Data file is 20 MB and I have

"this" has lots of parts.

Lets try "old accounts" first. The easiest way to get rid of old accounts but not lose history is to not create old accounts. For example, when you change banks for your checking account, keep on using the same Quicken account. You will have to think about recociliation, but it's quite easy.

The alternate way, having already created an old checking account is to move every transaction to the new account (it helps in doing this if you have been diagnosed with obsessive/compulsive disorder). Arrange your screen (tabs, bars - depending on the version of Quicken that you have) so that you can switch between the two accounts with a single click; for non-transfers: copy, delete, change account, paste, record; for transfers: ctl-X, change transfer account. after the first 300 or 400 you get quite speedy at doing this.

I have one Visa and one Mastercard account. Whichever Visa card is being used, transactions are recorded in that one Visa account. I have accounts for some individual doctors and when a doctor's account is no longer used those transactions are moved, 1 by 1 as above, to a general "medical" account. So I have no old accounts.

Now on to the more interesting stuff. Like you, I'd like to reduce history and not lose anything (well, not much). Like everyone else who has posted to this thread (and to the many prior threads - including myself) the easiest answer is to just leave things alone.

As with accounts, you can reduce history by not creating it. If you have an account that you don't need to reconcile and that is paying a trivial amount of interest each month, just wait till year-end and record only the total for the year. If obsessive/complusive disorder is driving you to record misc cash expenses each day, well stop and record only at month end. And so on.

But there may be a way to reduce existing history.. What I'd be willing to do is to replace detail records by summary records. Summaries for the same payee, category, and with blank memo fields. Different people would likely want summaries for different time periods: monthly, quarterly, annual. So the only history I'm willing to lose is how many times I went to Safeway; I'd still know totals at Safeway by category for my chosen time period and I wouldn't lose any memo details.

To accomplish such summarization one or more accounts would have to be exported, those records processed by another program to summarize them, the original accounts deleted, and the summarized records imported to recreate those same accounts.

Reads as if easy to do, but there are two problems.

A minor problem - there is information about the account itself, description for example that I don't know if exported/imported or not. So you might have to record the account information before deleting.

The major problem is transfers - getting transfers linked up when importing multiple files with transfers between accounts in the imported files, and between an imported file and an existing file. Which gets me to the point I was aiming at when I began to write this post.

Quicken has a "recategorize" feature and, looking at the screen presented on my version of Quicken (version 4, 1994) it would appear that I can recategorize transfers to non-transfer categories and vice versa. If someone wants to test that functionality and can demonstrate recategorization from tranfers to non-transfers and then back to transfers, ending up with correctly linked transactions, then it would seem possible to: recategorize transfers, export accounts, operate on those exported records, import the revised records, and recategorize back to transfers - all without error. (for anyone who looks at the recategorization feature, a case to include is a split transaction where the splits include two transfers to the same account and those two transfers have different memo fields)

dick w