#Quicken software for mac reviews update#
#Quicken software for mac reviews upgrade#

#Quicken software for mac reviews upgrade#

But compared to past data upgrade scenarios, this one was smooth and simple.

#Quicken software for mac reviews update#

You do have to then manually update your investment accounts, and re-enter passwords, but that worked well enough. My test import worked quite well-it took about 30 minutes, and brought over every single transaction without any obvious failures. Those who found Quicken overly complex for their basic needs will probably find Essentials perfectly satisfying. Those who utilize most of the features of Quicken 2006/2007 (especially related to investments, taxes, and paying bills within the program) will find Essentials disappointing. I think Quicken Essentials will get different responses from different people, based on their own backgrounds. Accounts Summary presents a summary by account, though you can’t drill down into it. The Category Explorer makes it really easy to see a summary of spending by category and drill down into a given category to see exactly where your money went. Type something in there, and Essentials filters the display to show only entries that match your search terms. At the top right of the Transactions window (and all registers) is a Spotlight-like search box. There are some useful tools, too-Transactions presents what is essentially a global account register you can use this to enter transactions in any account. Quicken Essentials overview window gives you a summary look at your financesThe new interface is undeniably nicer looking than the old nobody who has used Quicken would ever describe its interface as elegant. To the right is a summary of your recent spending (we had a tax bill due in January, which explains the large percentage to one item), along with a preview of upcoming bills and an overview of your spending against your budget (not yet set up in my screen shot). Accounts are grouped by category, each identified by a unique icon. Down the left hand side is a list of your accounts, along with some standardized tools at the top and reports at the bottom. In Essentials, the program opens to an Overview window that could easily be described as such. The look of the program is completely unlike any version of Quicken ever seen-the default view looks much more like a program from the iLife suite than something from Intuit. Now developed in Cocoa, you get all the benefits of the best OS X development environment-Services work, for instance, and if you’re used to various text field shortcuts (Control-A to jump to the beginngin of a field), those all work too. (For more on the history of Quicken and how Essentials fits in, read this article, by Jason Snell, about the release.) OverviewĪs you may have read by now, Quicken Essentials is a ground-up rewrite of Quicken. What it is is an overview of the new program, and my observations after putting it to use for two days. What follows is not a review of Quicken Essentials-we’ll have that done in the near future. For instance, on August 22nd, 1994, I paid $753 for a 1GB hard drive-ouch!) Now, though, I’ve had the shipping version of Quicken Essentials on my machine for two days, and have given it what I consider the ultimate test: I fed it my Quicken 2006 data file, containing every financial transaction I’ve been involved with since 1993-nearly 17 years’ worth of data! (This is a depressing history to look through, so I try my best to avoid it. When I chatted with Patzer about Essentials, the product wasn’t out yet and I hadn’t seen it in person, so we spent a few minutes discussing the features of the new program.

But no, here I am again with a First Look at Quicken Essentials for Mac I guess I’m a glutton for punishment or something. After all the exceedingly positive…oh wait, it was incredibly negative…response to my podcast discussion with Aaron Patzer, head of Intuit’s Quicken team, you think I’d run away from anything having to do with Quicken Essentials.