Quicken 2007 Premier

Pros: Enhanced online banking capability

Cons: Document imaging was not working, & their tech support was no help

Summary: Quicken 2006 (previous version) included the ability to attach scanned and downloaded images to transactions-- something that I have made extensive use of, to cut way back on the mountains of papers I used to file. The 2007 version promised major enhancements to this capability, which is why I purchased the new version as soon as it was released.

Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that once I installed 2007, I could no longer access existing attachments, nor could I create new ones. If I tried to use a .mdi file (Microsoft's imaging format) I got an error that the file could not be accessed. When I tried using .pdf files, it was even worse; as soon as I would try to open the .pdf file, Quicken would quit, without so much as an error message.

After spending a couple of hours trying to troubleshoot this myself, I reported it to Quicken's tech support, and dutifully followed their instructions: delete and reinstall all pdf drivers, reinstall Quicken, start with an empty Quicken datafile. None of this solved the problem (it didn't help that some of their responses where in such fractured English as to render them nearly incomprehensible.) Finally I reinstalled the 2006 version, and all my attached documents were once again working. Because I use Quicken on an almost daily basis, I had to make the decision to revert to the earlier version rather quickly, since any work I did in the 2007 version was not backwards-compatible with my 2006 files. Whatever prevented the imaging from working in 2007, it certainly wasn't a problem with the 2006 version.

With the little bit of time that I did run 2007, I was glad to see that they had made some major improvements with Online Banking. For instance, with my E*Trade bank accounts I had to manually import the data into 2006-- it was easy to do, but still not automatic (E*Trade Brokerage has long been supported for auto-updates.)

There was also an overhaul to the look and feel of the screens. Unfortunately, Quicken doesn't give you the option of keeping the old skins, which I would have preferred.

I don't know if I'll give 2007 another shot in a few months, when they have hopefully worked-out the bugs with the imaging, or just wait until 2008 and see what's new there. Though, as a very long-time Quicken user (going back to DOS versions) I have lost a bit of faith in Intuit with this last go-around.