Rating: 
Summary: Major Disappointment
Review: After using Microsoft Money on PCs for many years, I decided to purchase a Mac. Since Money doesn't come in a Mac version, I decided to give quicken a try. I've been using it for about a month now and I get more discouraged by the day.I have windows close unexpectedly, I'm unable to create certain entries, even when following the manual, and the on-screen help is useless. Performing a search for a topic will bring up a large variety of random help topics, few if any have anything to do with your search entry. Oh, and the entries in the manual sometimes do not actually reflect the steps you must take to complete an action. For example, if you are directed to select an option from a toolbar drop-down screen, that option might not actually be located there, but exists on another toolbar. Web help is no better than on-screen help. And customer support is structured to make sure that it is not used. If you can't find what you need by searching the support database, you can either use the online support chat feature that is only available W-F, 7AM to 4 PM PST, or pay by the minute for phone support. By the way, don't try using chat unless you have a lot of time to kill because you might never actually get connected to a customer support person. The option to e-mail a support engineer is not available. Planning tools in Quicken are inferior to MS Money. You don't have near as many options to categorize your expenses, and I'll be damned if I can figure out how Quicken will help me come tax time. It doesn't even let you configure your paycheck deductions as pre-tax and after-tax. I think I'm going to sell my Mac and buy a PC so I can use MS Money again. Too bad Quicken isn't working out.
Rating: 
Summary: You're on your own here.
Review: I got Quicken 2003 for Mac because I am tired of transscribing brokerage data by hand into my spreadsheet and I was looking forward to download data directly on line. But wait.. you have to set up your portfolio history first if you want to get accurate cost data.
When moving securities into the investment account, you don't get a chance to specify if this is a stock, mutual fund, or bond.You have to do this by editing later.
The manual, in PDF format, is too small to fill a page for printing and that's the only manual you get. To get help on line you have to have an on-line "chat" with a tech. it turned out to be very frustrating: He either did not understand my problem or I couldn't understand his answers.
Phone support is [$$] per minute! The only books I could find are for Windows. The program is full of bells and whistles you may never need, but very hard to learn and not at all "intuitively obvious". Nowhere can you find a list of what the toolbar command buttons do, so that you could decide which ones you need and which you don't.
The data backup files are not dated. The numbering scheme for backup files is an Intuit secret.
I wish there were another option for downloading brokerage data but Charles Schwab treated Mac-users as second-class citizens up to this verson of Quicken.
M. Ben-Ari
Rating: 
Summary: They have us trapped and now they even hosed us.
Review: I have 10,000 hours of pluging in Quicken transactions into various versions Quicken for the Mac. My computer is totally dedicated to TurboTax for mac and Quicken for mac because my Quicken file is more important than anything else in my life. I've run it on 5 different Macs over the many years and my investments go back to 1985. I got 2003 and immeadiatly updated the software to version R4. Don't know about bugs before R4 but 2003 R4 won't do net worth graphs or reports over a range. For example: Ask for a report of your net worth on 12/31 for the last 10 years and the amounts go into the stratosphere. It will calculate your net correctly if you only ask for one specific date. Just forget about graphing things over time. The program is screwed up. It must be adding everything together. Otherwise, I have been able to continue as usual with all my pounding of data and so far it all seems correct. I havn't experienced any of the problems noted in these other messages but I haven't had to do some of those things. My advise. WAIT. This version is screwed up. Don't buy it unless you have to in order to get to your bank or credit card or broker. My experience on that is that its too much trouble and not worth the gamble of screwing up your file. My file is too valuble to risk downloads of stupid transactions that I can enter myself exactly correct. If I had read these reviews before I bought and loaded up 2003 I would NEVER EVER have even thought of doing it. Go ahead though. Spin the revolver and put the gun to your head. I would wait until these reviews turn positive. Wait until R5 comes out. You know? 5th time is a charm...or was that "Third time is a charm" Anyway...wait for R5 on the websit at least. If you don't understand what I mean by R4 and R5. You buy 2003 for the Mac and then they put patches and updates on the Intuit site for you to get. Everybody that buys 2003 has to first get the updates to off the internet to get going.
Rating:
Summary: DON"T DO IT
Review: I have been using Quicken 2000 Deluxe for years on a PC and recently switched to the Mac. Before this, I loved Quicken and I'm great at using it. After hours of trying to get my account balances to match up after moving them over, I give up. Whats more, in the Mac version there is no easy screen to give you a synopsis of everything going on in Quicken like there is in the PC version. Even more of a travesty is that Quicken 2003 for the Mac does not know what a 401(k) account is. There are no wizards to help set up a 401k account, much less to update one, so if you want to keep your 401k accounts current, you may have to take a class on manual 401k entries. I'm so frustrated by this product that I have decided to actually keep my PC solely to run Quicken 2000. One more thing - in the Mac the font sizes are so small you need special glasses to read your data. If you are currently using Quicken on the PC and want to switch to it on the Mac, you'll be disappointed. I wish I would have known this before I bought the software.
Rating:
Summary: Buggiest Quicken Yet
Review: I have been using Quicken for Mac for the past 10 years. Early on it was a very solid, useful program. Unfortunatly, each release is more buggy than the last. Naive as I am, I would keep upgrading in the hope that the new version will somehow be stable, and will have taken care of bugs identified in previous versions. This time I upgraded to get Mac OS 10 native support. With the release of Quicken 2003 it is now clear that these folks just don't care. The program crashes several times during each use. It will crash if you try to change account information from within the expense entry form of the calendar. It will claim to not be able to find the account. Post crash you will see that it did know the account and did make the change. Many reports do not paint on the screen fully, chopping off about an inch down the report. The loan function does not work at all with Quicken randomly reassigning loan values from one loan to another. Sometimes when the program crashes it is unable to reopen the data file. You are then forced to work from an old back-up. Don't try to open a Quick Report if you already have one open -- it'll cause the program to crash. They recently released a R4 patch for the program. Naive that I am I downloaded and added the patch last night hoping against all hope that some bugs would be fixed. Nope -- Now instead of taking 2 seconds to load on a G4, it takes 115 seconds to load while the harddrive goes crazy. When you are sitting in front of a computer monitor waiting to get to work -- 115 seconds can seem like an eternity. I will never buy another Intuit product. I don't expect perfect, bugs happen, but I do expect that software would not be released with known bugs. There is no way I can concieve of the Quicken team not knowing about the many bugs in this product .. and then selling it to you anyway.
Rating:
Summary: Not as good or intuitive as the Windows version,but it works
Review: I have not had the stability issues that other users have talked about - it has run pretty solid for me thus far.
My beef is that the Windows version of Quicken is easier to use and frankly has a lot more features. I still have yet to figure out some basic stuff on Quicken for Mac that I used to do with no problem back on my Pentium III.
(Mac users need to be forewarned that Bank of America does not support some of the built-in banking features (like billpay) that the Windows version does support.)
Well, anyway I give it 3 stars for running ok for me, but Intuit needs to take note that there is still a lot of room for improvement here.
Rating:
Summary: True, true........
Review: I have switched from Quicken for Mac to PC AND back and I would say the switch back to Mac was much much easier that to the PC. I only had to fuss with symbols. It wasn't hard, just time consuming.
I have noticed a considerable slowdown of transfers with 2003 for Mac over 2001. It takes several seconds to process the download information after downloading is complete. It takes no time to get the information from the bank, but too long to process it. It also takes a long time to quit. I'm hoping this improves with OS X.2. Overall it is a good product.
Rating: 
Summary: Looks nicer than Windows version EASY and FAST!
Review: i just "switched" to Mac from Wintel/Linux and I am getting some programs converted.
YOU MUST INSTALL THE UPDATES! I went into Quicken 2003 and went to File and clicked on Check for updates this brought down Patch R4 - EASY install. After that I opened help and learned how to convert my Wintel Quicken to Mac Quicken by exporting the QIF file (emailed it to the Mac - no floppy) - EASY import into Quicken for Mac. Then I setup my online accounts and starting using it. All in all I am happy with Mac Quicken coming from Win Quicken. It like everything else on a Mac looks cleaner but you'll find somethings they left out on the Mac version like the main screen that gives you a synopsis of everything and a overall chart. Oh yeah don't believe everything people are saying on these reviews Mac downloads at the same rate the Windows version does - I tested this! Good product! Macs and Unix rule!
Rating: 
Summary: Better than PC's version
Review: I just switched to Mac and of course had to buy Quicken for Mac. I had been using PC version Quicken 2000. This is much better. It intergrates a way to pay one's bills, where the other didn't have a way to do that. I previously had to set up an account of "accounts payable" where now in this version, I used the Calender and enter in my bills that way. Works well with OS X.
Rating:
Summary: A month-long nightmare
Review: I rate Quicken 2003/Mac lower than 1. I've used Quicken for PC since 1993 and conversion was a nightmare.
1) I had to try many times to get exported QIFs of more than 0-40 KB. Restored back-up files worked better.
2) First conversion deleted all my checking, cash, and credit card amounts and dumped stock transactions into my checking account. When I complained to Quicken HELP, they offered to convert my files at $150 each.
3) Investment prices were WILDLY off by plus or minus millions.
4) Instructions for entering prices said "in Portfolio, type the date, enter the price, and Record." However if I typed, for example, 12/31/99 and entered the correct price, it recorded as of the current date (ex.) 10/15/02. Website and help materials don't mention entering prices under DETAILS. Further, if I typed in a past date, it still showed my portfolio as of Today. I had to click-click-click the calendar beside the date field.
5) I started hand-entering investment prices for each year, 1993-2002 and discovered prices from 1993 or 2002 for stocks I'd owned 95-98. If the dates were correct, the prices had no relation whatsoever to reality.
6) I'd get a Mac file corrected one day, but when I re-opened it, all my work was undone. Prices I'd laboriously entered for Stock A appeared under stock D. I'd re-enter correct information, only to have different errors show up. This went on for nearly a month.
7) If a security had changed name, I couldn't change or delete either name. I had investments where the stock was under 1 name; prices another and the Accounts list came up blank. It would have required establishing a 3rd file and hand-entering each transaction.
8) When I called Quicken Helpline to report problems, I was told I was doing it wrong or there was a wrong transaction. I cross-checked every transaction, Windows - Mac, and they were identical, but the totals were different.
If I could find an alternative to Quicken 2003/Mac I'd jump for it.
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