Customer Reviews

Quicken 2002 Deluxe [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

I have used Quicken for many years and I've always liked the product. This version is a nice upgrade and is probably worth it for any Quicken owner to pick it up.

I also picked up Microsoft Money 2002 since it had a great rebate from the wholesale store. Money will convert Quicken 2001 files cleanly, so it was easy to compare the products. Microsoft Money is different, but equally capable for the most part. I recommend Microsoft Money to anyone who has not already become familiar with Quicken. Money seems to be easier to learn and use than Quicken. But if you are comfortable with Quicken, I don't see any real value in Money over Quicken to justify the learning curve.

WARNING!!! I recently had a minor problem with a corrupt quicken file which I corrected. It made me more consciences about running VALIDATE periodically. Before upgrading to Quicken 2002, I ran Validate and Super-Validate and no problems were found. After upgrading I ran Validate and Super-Validate again, with no problems. I went online to update my register and post payments and then I ran Validate once again. This time I had 167 errors. I don't know what it "fixed", but I got really nervous. I validated a second time, no problems. I went online again the next day, then validated again, and more errors were found. I hope that Quicken is just cleaning up some online garbage ... no apparent problems exist in my data ... just please run VALIDATE frequently to be extra safe, and run your backups too.

I also had a problem where I had duplicate scheduled payments in my Quicken schedule. I was able to identify which payments were legitimate and which were not, so I cleaned up that mess. This problem is addressed in the Quicken knowledgebase, albeit poorly addressed.

This makes three seperate data problems with Quicken. One with Quicken 2001 and two with Quicken 2002. All within the last two months. All three were caused by Quicken, so I am getting nervous about trusting this company with my data. I am running Validate frequently now and I recommend that you do too.

I like Quicken and I will continue to use it as long as I can continue to trust it with my data. I like the new features in this upgrade. Microsoft Money is a great product as well, but not worth the learning curve to switch. If you do buy or use Quicken, just be extra careful to validate your data frequently.

Having been a Quicken user for more than ten years and having recently upgraded from Quicken 2000, this new version is a disappointment. There aren't any compelling new features (the new reports are nice, but how many do you need?) On the downside: (1) it's much slower to open, (2) it has lots of gimicky links to more stuff to purchase from Intuit. Example: On the Finance Menu there's an item that says "Manage Payroll". Click on it and you get a ad telling you to buy QuickPayroll. You can't turn this junk off.

It's not horrible, it's just stupid.

I regret having upgraded but once your file is converted and you've updated data you can't go back. If you have Quicken 2K or later and are satisfied, pass on this one.

I was previously running Quicken 2000 and loved it. I "upgraded" to 2002 hoping to get up-to-date tax information for tax planning and faster recognition of categories based on 2002's ability to recognize businesses. My recommendation to anyone with 2000 or 2001 is to keep what you've got.

Here are my complaints. First, in order to install 2002 in the default directory, I had to uninstall 2000. The 2000 version was pre-installed on my computer, so there is no practical way to recover it. You can change the install directory, but I suspect that this will result in numerous conflicts and files not found.

The program crashes constantly, although the number of crashes seems to decrease with use.

You get bombarded with alerts and suggestions for scheduled transactions that must be cleared out one at a time (automated alerts is one of the features advertised in this version). Buy a book from Amazon.com, and the purchase will appear as an alert for the next month. I continue to get warnings that several accounts are past due, even though they are all up to date and have entries in the register. Several areas show some type of warning icon that I cannot get rid of. For example, I have chosen not to supply some information on my bank accounts to Quicken. The result is warning icons on the overview pages for the account.

Planning, tax, and investment calculations appear inaccurate. I am also unimpressed by the Quicken's inability to handle more that one Flexible Spending Account.

Finally, as other users have noted, you get bombarded with links for other Quicken services. The bottom of each page provides icons for these services, and I have not yet found a way to turn them off.

If you own *any* previous version of Quicken, don't upgrade.
Q2002 is a mess, it does not offer *any* significant new features over Q2000, but many new bugs.

Investment tracking still does not work properly, cost basis and holding periods just can't be gotten right in the presence of anything as trivial as spin-offs or stock swaps...

Q2002 forces Quicken.com on you, you can't use the download feature for stock quotes and from your brokers unless you enable Quicken.com -- now you're only one accidental click away from
transmitting your private & sensitive investment data to some "secure" server over which you have no control..

Finally, the number of protection faults and other crashes has increased notably over Q2000.

I have been a loyal Quicken upgrader for years, and I find myself frustrated with every upgrade. First of all, they don't give you much of a deal on upgrades for being a loyal customer. Check out MS Money 2002 Deluxe. (...)

Missing features: Does not handle exchange-traded options at all. Only handles employee stock options in a rudimentary way. Help files are terribly incomplete with some "features" not documented at all. Unlike almost every other Windows program, in Quicken you can only look at one window at a time, so it is very difficult to compare one register to another. Unfortunately, the program consumes memory as though every window in the Quick Tabs section is open, but the program doesn't update them until you click on them. The program is slow, slow, slow even on a fast machine, and it gets worse as the data files get larger. The reports and graphs section is so inflexible as to be almost comical. There is no "Undo" command, and once you've entered something, it is automatically saved and becomes a permanent part of your file. In other words, you can't even "quit without saving" as an "Undo" command. Feel free to put in all of the feature requests you want to at the Quicken tech support web site, but they will ignore them all.

Bugs: This company has no concept of testing before shipping a product. The program can corrupt your data in such a way that the Validate and Super Validate functions can't catch it - much less correct it. When you finally do discover it, you can't restore just a piece from back up - it's all or nothing. I back up after every session, but even so, in my case, this meant a choice between re-entering weeks of data or just living with the missing (corrupted) data. Tech support, if you can call it that, is of very little use, and they are expensive. The program arbitrarily fails to download your data over the Internet for days at a time, but tech support has no clue how to fix it. The program quietly does automatic program updates which change the way certain parts work, so now my scroll button only works in about half of the windows where it used to work, and the Enter key now functions ever so slightly differently when entering data. Sometimes the program just crashes right in the middle of an operation. Did it complete what I was doing? Did it go back to the last fully completed operation? Did it corrupt some portion of my data file that I won't notice for weeks? There is no way to know. Feel free to put in all of the bug fix requests you want to at the Quicken tech support web site, but they will ignore them all - upgrade after upgrade.

This program is probably fine if you just use it to track your checkbook and follow some simple investments.

I am a long, long time Quicken user. I track over 200 stocks using Quicken. I upgraded to 2002 Deluxe from Quicken 99. It was a disaster. The new program tried to convert my files to the new file system in 2002 and lost them all. It caused a General Windows Fault every time I tried to access my portfolio. I tried to uninstall Quicken 2002 and reinstall Quicken 99 (which had worked flawlessly for 4 years) and now it causes Windows to crash.

Quicken technical help tried to charge me $2.00/minute to help me. They won't even talk to you until you give them your credit card number. The whole thing is a disaster. Why did I ever try to upgrade?

I echo others that have had problems with Quicken 2002. I recently tried to upgrade from 2000 and like others have had problems with the data files being corrupted. Technical support has been no help. It seems that this is a common problem. The program will loose data or corrupt it and then you are lost. The only advice given by technical support is to start over and re-enter each account one at a time. This takes hours and hours. I did this and the program still has glitches. Intuit needs to do a better job of converting the files and making sure all past data can be transported from one version to another. Unlike others, running supervalidate or validate does not correct the problems. Data when recreating the main accounts is not available, such as what was in any retirement planning previously created or data in a home loan that might have been tied to certain accounts. If I had it to do over I would have stayed with Quicken 2000.

I am very computer literate, but have never used any of the computer-based money management software before. Having finally
decided to take the plunge and put all our finances on the computer, and figuring that Quicken was a well-known, well-respected name in financial software, we bought the Quicken 2002 Deluxe edition. Quite frankly, the program is awful.
It is extremely buggy which is bad enough, but there is VIRTUALLY NO USER SUPPORT!!!! In order to find out how to overcome the bugs in the software, you must pay [per]/min (plus your long distance charges) to talk to someone who likely cannot help you.
Unless you already know quicken and so don't need any help at all, I DO NOT RECOMMEND ANYONE BUYING THIS SOFTWARE.

Like other reviewers, I have used quicken for many years, and the 2002 program has a much nicer look and feel. The install went well and was easy. Unfortunatly, the program has some serious bugs, I also found the Net Worth, Balance Sheet, and other "Balance" reporting reports completly erroroneous. I too was unwilling to pay 1.95 per minute to assist Intuit in de-bugging their code. I was given the program by my bank and am attempting to get their help in getting Intuit to do something. I am probably going back to 2001. I would not recommend using this product until the bugs are worked out.

Well. I should have read the reviews more closely and just kept my 1999 version. At least it worked.

It installed and converted all my files without a problem. That's about the best thing I can say.

Problems:

It's slow. I have a dual Pentium 3 800, windows 2000, and so forth and so on. It CRAWLS on this machine.

NOTHING online will work. Not the online quote download, registration, etc. NOTHING! Tech support told me that their servers may be running "better" by Oct 20th and some versions of the software are having "problems". It's not my setup as everything else works, including Quicken 1999 Deluxe (until I uninstalled it to use 2002 Deluxe). Anyway, the tech support guy told me specifically that it was a problem on Intuit's end
and for me to be patient. Maybe they should refund the cost of the product and we should say "Be patient, we'll pay you when it works".

Tech support is now about $2.00 a minute unless you have one of a few "listed" problems. Careful, they even seemed willing to charge me for the knowledge about their servers "not working" until I called back and got a person who could communicate adequately.

Lots of annoying stuff in the menus like "Manage Employee Payroll". You go there and it brings up an add to sell you something. Being a software engineer myself - I find those kind of marketing tactics in the software EXTREAMELY unattractive.
Why diminish a potentially good piece of software with gimmicks.

Overall I'd say I wasted my money because it just is not working. If it worked as billed, as it seems to for some people, I'd have a much better rating for it. My advice, try Microsoft Money. If I can return Quicken - that's the route I'll take. So many bad reviews here on Amazon should have told me something - but I didn't listen thinking it would'nt happen to me.