Rating: Summary: Dissapointing Review: I have been using quicken for about three years now, and I recently upgraded to 2001. So far, I'm not impressed. Although Quicken's checkbook entry system is outstanding, most of the other features suffer from numerous drawbacks. The Tax Advisor is cumbersome to work with and has known problems with displaying information on the screen. As far as I can tell, Quicken also offers no updates once the tax year changes (other than forking over another 40 bucks or so for the 2002 edition), making the Advisor absolutly useless for planning your taxes beyond one year. The budget planning and debt reduction tools are not user-friendly and too simplistic to apply to real-world situations. Stock quote updates occasionally download invalid quotes (negative numbers, massive gains/losses, etc). The car price lookup service has no information on my 18 month old car, and the home price lookup is equally useless for the other 150 million of us who live in rural areas. Quicken is also a memory hog, and I've watched it continue to slow and bog down my system over time. The engineers better wake up and realize that as users enter more data over periods spanning years, the program must be streamlined to handle the increases in data. Come on, Intuit, this is a program for those of us who want to improve and learn about how our finances work. The 'massses' don't buy your product (most are oblivious to these things and like to stay that way), that's why we have AOL. So stop treating us like a mass market with all the ads. If this gets any worse, I'll be looking elsewhere for financial software.
Rating: Summary: Dissapointing Review: I have been using quicken for about three years now, and I recently upgraded to 2001. So far, I'm not impressed. Although Quicken's checkbook entry system is outstanding, most of the other features suffer from numerous drawbacks. The Tax Advisor is cumbersome to work with and has known problems with displaying information on the screen. As far as I can tell, Quicken also offers no updates once the tax year changes (other than forking over another 40 bucks or so for the 2002 edition), making the Advisor absolutly useless for planning your taxes beyond one year. The budget planning and debt reduction tools are not user-friendly and too simplistic to apply to real-world situations. Stock quote updates occasionally download invalid quotes (negative numbers, massive gains/losses, etc). The car price lookup service has no information on my 18 month old car, and the home price lookup is equally useless for the other 150 million of us who live in rural areas. Quicken is also a memory hog, and I've watched it continue to slow and bog down my system over time. The engineers better wake up and realize that as users enter more data over periods spanning years, the program must be streamlined to handle the increases in data. Come on, Intuit, this is a program for those of us who want to improve and learn about how our finances work. The 'massses' don't buy your product (most are oblivious to these things and like to stay that way), that's why we have AOL. So stop treating us like a mass market with all the ads. If this gets any worse, I'll be looking elsewhere for financial software.
Rating: Summary: Bugs, Bugs, Bugs Review: I have been using Quicken since DOS 2. Once the window based version became available, the versions seemed to be released in a semi-beta format. I do not upgrade every year just for this reason -- the new version is typically filled with bugs. Unfortunately I had forgotten this as the last version I purchased was '98. Now I have 2001 and guess what? -- I can't get the reports to work by individual class selection. I gave up on tech support. I had to reinstall Quicken 98 to run my reports! And this adds a missing feature in Quicken -- I cannot run a tax report which lists, in a two column format, a comparison of last year to this year -- an important quality control piece. So I use "class" categories to provide more flexibility. Gimmicky and flashy! I'd say "don't buy."
Rating: Summary: Great when it works, lousy support Review: I have never been able to get decent support for problems with Quicken, and they do crop up too often for something I have to rely on. Intuit has the worst support policy of any company I deal with, enough to make me seriously consider going through the pain of switching to Microsoft Money (and considering my opinon of Microsoft, that's saying a lot!). Latest example: I bought a new machine, followed the directions for backing up my files on the old machine and restoring them on the new machine. This lost all my preferences, but that was the minor nuisance. THE DEVESTATING PROBLEM IS THAT I CANNOT GO ONLINE TO ANY OF MY BANKING, BROKERAGE, OR CREDIT CARD COMPANIES NOW. Not a hint of a clue anywhere in the documentation, help, or website that Intuit ever considered that customers using the online features might upgrade their hardware. Rather than go through telephone hell and then pay $... a minute to discuss it with them, I'm out of here!
Rating: Summary: Great when it works, lousy support Review: I have never been able to get decent support for problems with Quicken, and they do crop up too often for something I have to rely on. Intuit has the worst support policy of any company I deal with, enough to make me seriously consider going through the pain of switching to Microsoft Money (and considering my opinon of Microsoft, that's saying a lot!). Latest example: I bought a new machine, followed the directions for backing up my files on the old machine and restoring them on the new machine. This lost all my preferences, but that was the minor nuisance. THE DEVESTATING PROBLEM IS THAT I CANNOT GO ONLINE TO ANY OF MY BANKING, BROKERAGE, OR CREDIT CARD COMPANIES NOW. Not a hint of a clue anywhere in the documentation, help, or website that Intuit ever considered that customers using the online features might upgrade their hardware. Rather than go through telephone hell and then pay $... a minute to discuss it with them, I'm out of here!
Rating: Summary: No Support Review: I have recently upgraded to this newest version of Quicken- only because I thought it was time to "modernize." I am an experienced Quicken user and have always enjoyed the program.But, upon upgrading I found a problem whithin one of the investment options. When this occurs, you call for help. Not with Quicken, however. Check out Intuits web page. They list FAQ's and have no provision for specific Q&A's. Call their phone number (not toll free) and you are put into a labrynth which get's you no where. They do have a bug feed back system, but no promises of fixes and they state that their policy is not to respond to you. You are putting your financial accounting in their hands, but they lack the most important ingredient to customer satisfaction- simple service. ( I did see a 900 number- but no thanks.) At this writing, I am consdiering reloading my old version. Help Intuit get the message. Don't buy or upgrade.
Rating: Summary: Quicken 2001>>> Review: I have used Quicken since the DOS days and have upgraded religiously over the years. I have had good experiences with earlier versions. My financial needs then were relatively simple and Quicken served me well. Times have changed. The observant longtime Quicken user will notice that Intuit has grown as well. Gone are the days of "passionate engineering" and welcome arrogant marketing. Rather that list my Quicken 2001R3 woes and shortcomings (I have been bug reporting and enhancement mentioning for quite some time) I wanted to confess that I actually downloaded... shall I mention it... MicroSoft Money. Yes I did. I even converted my 9+ years of Quicken data. Sorry Mr. Intuit. If MSM does not work out, I'll take my wife's advice and go back to paper and pencil.
Rating: Summary: Quicken 2001 Deluxe Review: I love Quicken, and have been using it for about 3 years. I've tried MS Money, and find Quicken a lot easier to use. That said, I'd call Quicken 2001 a minor release that doesn't really add much over Quicken 2000. The user interface, especially for the "My Finances" home page, looks quite a bit different. I'm not sure its better, just different. It more closely resembles the quicken.com website. For people who use both, this could be a plus. I've also found a few minor bugs that will hopefully be fixed in future updates. I was hoping Quicken 2001 would automatically download stock quotes every 10-15 minutes; it doesn't. One would think this would be an obvious fallout of merging Quicken 2001 with quicken.com. Heck, many brokerages offer free real time quotes over the Internet these days. The PIN vault still asks for a password every time you download, even if you've already typed it in earlier. Quicken still lacks a comprehensive ability to track insurance policies (life, auto, health, home) or provide estate planning advice. I would like to see something similar to the retirement planner for estate and insurance planning. Overall, I'm still very happy with the product. I'm hoping that Intuit is focusing their creative ideas on Quicken 2002, and that we'll see some great new features next year.
Rating: Summary: Why are we paying the same price to download? Review: I ordered and downloaded this version of quicken and discovered that all the multimedia parts are not included!! Had I known this, I would have ordered the real product with cd-rom instead. We can't use the self help movies because of the missing cd-rom disk. The rest of the program works fine, but I felt that the description of the download would state that certain files are not included. I would also like to see a price break as well. sprovost
Rating: Summary: Deluxe is much better than basic Review: I purchased the 2000 Basic version and just upgraded to the Deluxe for 2001. It's infinitely better than the basic edition for several reasons. The opening page is not garbled with a bunch of useless information, the support for online banking is better, and most importantly the 2001 Deluxe will actually track Stock Options for me. Trust me- if you want Quicken, spend the extra $20 or $30 and go for the deluxe- you'll be glad you did.
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