FAQ, discussions, and more. All changes large and small. Release notes (Quicken Support Site) Full release notes for each update. Manage your Quicken membership. Learn more about Quicken ID.In fact, one of my most popular blog posts is about how to hack in and fix a rather arcane (but common) issue with Quicken 2007.mac 2013 user guide now is not type of inspiring means. I’ve been using Quicken on the Mac since 1994, which happens to be the point in time where I decided that controlling my personal finances was fundamentally important. I am a die-hard Quicken user. Keyboard shortcutsRight away, you should know something about me. Update Quicken to the latest version. Update your Quicken software.Intuit has really backed themselves into a corner, and not surprisingly, Apple has no interest in bailing them out. So it pains me to write this blog post, because the situation with Quicken for the Mac has become extremely dire. Bill Pay is arguably the most requested feature in Quicken for Mac. It can convert Quicken Mac 2007.After Mac users were let down by a lite version of Bill Pay in Quicken 2016 for Mac, it seems that the new product development team at Quicken have finally listened to the complaints of Mac users and added a fully functional Quicken Bill Pay for Mac in Quicken for Mac 2017.
![]() I love Mint, and I’ve been using it for years. So I’m going with them on this one. And they can put you in jail and take everything you own. At least, the IRS thinks so. In their words, “this option is ideal if you do not track investment transactions and history, use online bill pay or rely on specific reports that might not be present in Quicken Essentials for Mac.” Um, sorry, who in their right mind doesn’t want to track “investment transactions”? Turns out, at tax time, knowing the details of what you bought, at what price, and when are kind of important. It’s a great new application written from the ground up. Seriously? 1999 called and they want their advice back. You can switch to Quicken for Windows. Which includes my 401k, for example. Unfortunately, Mint is basically blind to anything it can’t integrate with online. For me, Mint is something I use in addition to Quicken. I’m not sure how many people are actually affected. You will need to either re-download your investment transactions or manually enter them.”This is an epic disaster. By the way, to add insult to injury: “You can easily convert your Quicken Mac data with the exception of Investment transaction history. This led Intuit to massively under-invest in their Mac codebase, yielding a monstrosity that apparently no one in their right mind wants to touch. (The bar talk between Adobe & Intuit on this mistake must be really fun a few drinks into the evening.) Whoops. After all, Apple was dying. Hey, they thought it was the prudent thing to do then. Around 2000, Intuit made the mistake of abandoning the Mac. New antibiotics for mac(See note on the IRS above) It’s a bizarre miss given that tracking investment transactions is a basic tax requirement. But in the end, it was a very expensive decision, and even if it was necessary, it should have mandated a fast follow with that capability. I’ve spent more than a decade in software product management, so I have compassion for how hard that decision must have been. Sometime in the past few years, someone decided that Quicken Essentials for the Mac didn’t need to track investment transactions properly. Untouchable, unfortunately, means unfixable. It’s not like Apple was going back to PowerPC.If you examine the three strikes, you see that Intuit made a couple of tactical & strategic mistakes here. They dropped support for Mac OS Classic in just a few years. You are talking about the company that killed floppy drives almost immediately in favor of USB in 2000, with no warning. Intuit had six years to make this migration, and to be honest, Apple is rarely the type of company to support long transitions like this. Fast forward to June 2011, and Apple announces that their latest operating system, Mac OS X Lion, will not support the backwards compatibility software to allow PowerPC applications to run on Intel Macs.With all due respect to my good friends at Intuit, this problem is really Intuit’s fault. Yes, that’s *six* years ago. Newest Quicken License Rosetta ToThey do not want to create zombie applications that necessitate bug-for-bug fixes over the long term. They want to push software developers to new code, new user experience, and best-in-class applications. They want to simplify the operating system (brutally). Or maybe they could license Rosetta to Intuit to bundle with Quicken 2007.Apple’s not going to do it. Many system utilities are distributed with stripped, headless versions of Mac OS X. Quicken 2007 R4 installed / configured to run at launchOK, this solution isn’t perfect, but it is plausible. Custom “headless” install of Mac OS X 10.6.8, stripped to just support the launch of Quicken 2007. If this is true, this reflects a fundamental shift in Apple’s attitude toward this technology. Apple has announced that Mac OS X Lion will include a change to the terms of service to allow for virtualization. I buy TurboTax every year, and I use Quicken every week. If Intuit can’t work this out, I just might try to hack this solution myself.In the end, I’m a loyal Intuit customer. They are changing the virtualization terms for Mac OS X Lion, so why not change them for Snow Leopard to0.I’m a daily VMware Fusion user, which is how I use both Windows & Mac operating systems on my MacBook Pro. I’m guessing that Intuit & VMware might be able to work out a deal here, especially since Intuit would be promoting VMware to a large number of Mac users, and even subsidizing it’s adoption.This is always the $64,000 question, but theoretically, this feels like really not much of a give on Apple’s part. They can distribute new images as necessary.The cost of VMware Fusion for the Mac is non trivial, but actually roughly the same price as a new version of Quicken. A VMware image allows Intuit to configure & test a standard release package, and ensure it works. ![]() I downloaded a 30-day free, full-feature version and was encouraged when I was able to export my Quicken data file and then import into iBank without a hitch.I obviously have very little experience with iBank, so take what I say below with a grain of salt.The main problem I’ve found so far is with iBank’s reporting capabilities. Maybe a future column here can examine a few of those alternatives.Ever since receiving “the” notorious email from Intuit 2 days ago about Quicken 2007 going away with Lion, I started looking into iBank4. And that means finding Mac personal finance software that works. But most users just want a simple solution that meets their needs. You can select landscape mode and type in a % scale, but it has you effect, you always get a fixed (and quite large size) font in portrait mode.These are “features” that should be relatively easy to fix, but at the moment (version 4.2.4) they’re a real nuisance.I have not upgraded to Lion yet, but plan to in the near term. Even though there’s the usual File>Page Setup… menu item, it doesn’t seem to work. So, if you’re like me and have a checking account register that goes back many years, you may get an 80-page printout! Not good if all you’re looking for is the last month or so.I’ve found a kludgy way around some of this by using a feature called “Smart Account”, which works sort of OK however you can’t format the printout into landscape mode or even scale it to make it fit on one page. If you try to do a simple print of, e.g., your checking account in iBank you are given no option for selecting a time frame (or range of check numbers). This is easy to do in Quicken, but not so with iBank.Another type of report I use frequently with Quicken is “Print Register” (e.g., my checking account) for a particular time period – again, very easy to do in Quicken.
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