Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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84 of 87 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
May not be worth the upgrade!, August 8, 2004
I upgraded the 2004 version to this version (2005) and found it to be faster but most of the other improvements were bug fixes that should have been made to the 2004 version without an upgrade price. They seem to take the Microsoft approach of making customers pay for bug fixes. If the few, new features and faster speed are enough for you then get it!
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54 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Recommended for new or holdout users, February 13, 2005
I would recommend this program to anyone who is considering a Mac-based personal finance program for the first time. It is far better than the two-star rating given by frustrated upgraders on this site would imply. I would also recommend it to some of the holdout Quicken users like me who do not want to repeatedly pay for the same bugs. However, without any significant competition, and the limited market share of the Macintosh, one must be prepared to suffer from limited support for this program. Were it not for this shortcoming, I would give this program 5 stars.
My history of Mac-based financial tracking programs goes all the way back to "Managing Your Money" by Andrew Tobias using a Mac LC in the early 1990's. This excellent program was edged out by a glitzier program, Quicken, which I converted to because it could track investments such as stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. It was the only program at the time that could accurately calculate the "internal rate of return" (IRR) on investments, which I believe is the only way to see how well that one is doing. I have stayed with Quicken through all its upgrades and find it to be an excellent way to track virtually all personal finances. It is far better than anything else that is currently available for the Mac. I have used this program with very few negative incidents at least every week for many years and find it invaluable for tracking checking & savings accounts, credit cards, salary, and investments including stocks, bonds, and retirement(401k, 403b, IRA) accounts.
Looking at the other reviews on this site, one may think that this program is pretty much of a dog. This is far from true; the poor reviews are from those that have an earlier version and are disappointed that the upgrade does not add enough new features to justify the cost of an annual upgrade. I cannot argue with this perception. The frustration is compounded when an upgrade is offered with known bugs not fixed.
The permanent bug problem in Quicken started in the late 1990's . My biggest personal disappointment was converting to Quicken 2002. All my hand-entered price information for investments was not transferred over to the new program! Prices of publicly-traded items could be downloaded, but this did not cover everything that I had. I lost many years of data. I believe that there is a great pent-up demand of existing Quicken users for a new version of Quicken with no new features, but a comprehensive list of all fixed bugs.
Examples of persistent bugs were the following: Opening a split transaction sometimes put the cursor one line away from the cursor on the screen. Some, but not all, multiple-item Portfolio displays always collapsed and had to be manually re-opened, which is not fatal, but is annoying. Every time one tried to memorize a customized report, the program crashed. This bug started in the transition from OS 9 to OS X. The program recovers without losing anything, but this does inspire confidence. As OS X was upgraded, several features that worked started to behave erratically. Notes in the calendar would jump to the dock whenever they were opened. The quick-math calculator jumped to the upper-left corner with only the bottom edge of the window visible.
I tried to report bugs to Intuit in the mid 1990's, but learned that it was not a productive activity. This experience is confirmed by postings from other frustrated users, an attitude that pervades most of the current reviews of Quicken 2005. I transitioned from someone who always bought the next update to one who updated only when I changed operating systems.
When I got my latest new Mac, it came with Quicken 2004. A quick check confirmed that all the above listed problems still persisted in the program, so I just whacked it and stayed with Quicken 2002.
A little over a month ago, I received a letter from Intuit informing me that it would no longer support download requests for the Quicken 2002 program. Needless to say, I did not greet this with any enthusiasm. However, the program is so essential to my life that I felt that I had to do something. A serious review of alternatives quickly revealed that Quicken, with all its frustrations, is still very much better than anything else on the market. I got the program and applied for the $30 rebate because I have also purchased TurboTax.
To my surprise, many of the bugs that have persisted through several Quicken upgrades have been fixed in Quicken 2005. The program imported all my price information and all but one of the bugs listed above have been fixed. The program still crashes whenever I try to memorize a custom report, but I rarely do this anymore. In any case, the bug is like so many of the other problems with Quicken: merely annoying, but not damaging. My data file size has ballooned up from 2.3 MB to 8 MB and some processes seem to take slightly longer, but not significantly so. I find this performance degradation disturbing because these calculations are not that complicated and my processor speed has increased by a factor of a hundred over the years. On balance, I am very satisfied with the newest version of the program. Note that I have not mentioned any of the new features of Quicken. I have not used any of these because they are mostly fluff. The best parts of Quicken were completed years ago. View Quicken as an excellent tool like a shovel. Do you really need a blinking light on the handle of a good shovel? The home inventory connection to iPhoto should be useful to some, and I plan to look at the improved tax planner, but I am not particularly hopeful.
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96 of 102 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not worth upgrade; little to nothing has been improved, August 5, 2004
I found little to no improvements in this new version of Quicken versus the 2004 version. It is simply not worth upgrading if you own the 2004 version. Previous version owners may find an upgrade more compelling depending on how old their version is.
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