Quicken

Our next stop, financial management. I’ve used Quicken for ten years now, and I’m quite dependent on it, especially at tax time.

My Quicken 2007 for Windows was working properly under Parallels, but by now I was like a man possessed; native OS X applications or nothing.

Actually, truth be told, I’m somewhat less than completely thrilled with the Quicken for Windows 2007 UI; anything would be a welcome change.

I was used to upgrading Quicken under Windows. In general, if the new release is within three years of the prior release, it’s just a matter of installing the upgrade and watching the magic happen.

Moving platforms isn’t nearly that easy, but it’s not horrible, either. The Quicken help site provides this document containing helpful instructions on how to convert, what will convert, and what won’t. In short, one exports from the old system to a .QIF file, then imports the .QIF file into the new system.

In my case, all I really cared about was our banking accounts, since they contained ten years of data that I really didn’t want to lose. I track our investment accounts only quarterly, so potential loss of the information there was of no real consequence.

Which was good, since while the banking accounts made the transfer flawlessly, the investment accounts were problematic. Rather than attempt heroics here, I elected to delete them and reenter the latest quarterly share holdings data.

The change seems to have been worth it; the UI is in my opinion an improvement. Functionality seems to me to be identical, but then again I’m not making use of every facility that Quicken offers. One nice feature of note is the ability to automatically back up the Quicken data file to a .Mac account; more on that later.

Overall, one less reason to use the Windows environment.