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Quicken 2003 Basic

Quicken 2003 Basic

List Price: $29.95
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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Great product; not so good if you don't want online accounts
Review: This review is written from the point of view of someone who does not use the online features of Quicken. I'm sure those features have value, but if you want to use them I recommend you find a reviewer who can tell you about them. If like me you just use Quicken to record your financial transactions then read on.

The fundamentals of Quicken haven't changed much between this version and 1999, which was the previous version I used. However, I think users of older versions will find this one irritating in several ways. First, Quicken tries very hard to make all your accounts online. This means that you can't create an account that does not refer to an online institution without a bit of extra trouble; and once you've created the account, every time you try to reconcile, it wants you to download information from the web. If you're tracking the downloaded information in any other way, as I am, this is just an irritant.

A second irritation is that once you do set up an account online, you are forced to change your password for each account. I actually agree that this is good security practice, but the user should be notified ahead of time that this will happen.

The screen area devoted to the actual Quicken layout is smaller. Much of the extra area is devoted to what are essentially advertisements for more Quicken products and functionality. With a bit of work I was able to figure out how to increase the area displaying transactions, but it's still less than it used to be.

The old tabbed layout, with right hand tabs for open accounts, has been changed to a left hand menu that is not shrinkable beyond a certain point. The bottom inch of the screen is reserved for clickable icons for your online accounts; this menu can't be removed -- a tremendous irritation as I never use it. There is no way to mark an account as "not an online account any more".

Reconciling is much as before, but the old facility whereby a carriage return would mark a transaction as reconciled and also move you down a line is gone. This is the single most annoying change for me; it more than doubles the time it takes to reconcile.

Overall, Quicken is a wonderful program, and I strongly recommend it -- it does great things and will save you time. But this version is, for me at least, a real step backwards. If, like me, you don't plan to use the fancy online features, I would recommend buying an older version if you have confidence it will run on your computer.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Great product; not so good if you don't want online accounts
Review: This review is written from the point of view of someone who does not use the online features of Quicken. I'm sure those features have value, but if you want to use them I recommend you find a reviewer who can tell you about them. If like me you just use Quicken to record your financial transactions then read on.

The fundamentals of Quicken haven't changed much between this version and 1999, which was the previous version I used. However, I think users of older versions will find this one irritating in several ways. First, Quicken tries very hard to make all your accounts online. This means that you can't create an account that does not refer to an online institution without a bit of extra trouble; and once you've created the account, every time you try to reconcile, it wants you to download information from the web. If you're tracking the downloaded information in any other way, as I am, this is just an irritant.

A second irritation is that once you do set up an account online, you are forced to change your password for each account. I actually agree that this is good security practice, but the user should be notified ahead of time that this will happen.

The screen area devoted to the actual Quicken layout is smaller. Much of the extra area is devoted to what are essentially advertisements for more Quicken products and functionality. With a bit of work I was able to figure out how to increase the area displaying transactions, but it's still less than it used to be.

The old tabbed layout, with right hand tabs for open accounts, has been changed to a left hand menu that is not shrinkable beyond a certain point. The bottom inch of the screen is reserved for clickable icons for your online accounts; this menu can't be removed -- a tremendous irritation as I never use it. There is no way to mark an account as "not an online account any more".

Reconciling is much as before, but the old facility whereby a carriage return would mark a transaction as reconciled and also move you down a line is gone. This is the single most annoying change for me; it more than doubles the time it takes to reconcile.

Overall, Quicken is a wonderful program, and I strongly recommend it -- it does great things and will save you time. But this version is, for me at least, a real step backwards. If, like me, you don't plan to use the fancy online features, I would recommend buying an older version if you have confidence it will run on your computer.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: this software sucks.
Review: This software does a terrible job to match the short sale and cover short transactions in my brokerage account. I have to manually specify those transactions to the right types ONE BY ONE and it still couldn't calculate the trasaction proceeds correctly. It is so frustrating. It wastes both money and time to use this software to track capital gains.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Stay with Quicken 2002
Review: Whoever designed this upgrade must have been a cartoonist. It's terrible. Gone are the easy to read full screens, lists, reports... Everything has a help section on the side, the bottom, etc... So the data you're looking for has a smaller screen to display on. Quicken ads and Quicken services bully themselves everywhere... If there is a way to take my data back to the 2002 format, please let me know


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