Quicken 2006 (Mac)

[aristobrat]

I know it's very new to market, but if anyone comes across any reviews (or has any experience with the product), if you could post here, I'd really appreciate it.

(Can you tell how much fun I'm *not* having running Money in Virtual PC?)

[greg]

[aristobrat]

Yeah, didn't have much luck with it. The biggest problem I had was that when setting up online accounts, you couldn't tell it how many days worth of transactions to initially download. It grabbed the last 6 months (!!) of transactions from my checking account, which was literally thousands I had to go thru and manually delete (one-by-one --- Command-D, answer yes .. repeat...) just to start fresh with last month.

I thought I was being a MS Money snob, but after seeing that its average customer Amazon rating is 1.5 stars out of 5 (after 33 reviews), I guess I'm not the only one not too happy with it.

The Windows Quicken 2006 reviews have been overall very positive. I'm praying that although the Mac version only sees a small subset of the Windows functionality that the overall experience is improved.

[Katya]

I saw a Quicken 2006 review at cnet.com but I can't remember if that was for a Windows or a Mac version. Are the 2 versions different?

[homerjatmoes]

[picaman]

There's lots of coverage about Quicken 2006 for Mac in the Intuit user forums (http://www.quickenforums.com/index.jspa?categoryID=1005) but I can summarize a few points quickly, having just migrated all my data from Quicken 2005 for Windows to Quicken 2005 for Mac:

--Quicken for Mac, feature-wise, is several versions behind its similarly-numbered Windows counterpart. Intuit's support of the Mac version also lags behind the Windows version.

--Data download from financial institutions is sparsely supported, mainly because Intuit insists on charging banks etc. twice, once for Windows capability and once for Mac capability. Therefore, many don't bother enabling Mac downloads.

--The first release of Quicken 2006 for Mac literally did not start up on many buyers' Macs. The R2 version addressed many of these problems but some remain.

--The file structure is not cross-platform. You can export data from one version and import it into the other, but much hand-checking and revisions of transactions and accounts will be necessary.

If you like, do a search on the Quicken forum for my user name--I've posted there about the travails of the conversion process. Many people run Quicken for Windows under Virtual PC on their Macs to avoid the plethora of problems. I chose to convert my data, but it was a long process, and I'm now entering most of my transactions by hand out of necessity as most of my financial institutions do not support the Mac.

I'm using the free version of Quicken for Mac 2005 that came with my Mac Mini, and in spite of the data conversion difficulties etc., the program itself has been rock solid and crash free. I'd say stick with that version, at least until there have been a couple of more incremental upgrades.

I absolutely love my Mac Mini and wouldn't return to my PC for anything; this was the single stumbling block.

: )

Jamie