Quicken Premier 2010

After about five years of using quicken I switched to MS Money for about a decade and found it more user friendly. When MS anounced it was going to stop producing Money I decided to give Quicken a try again. Sorry I wasted the money. Most of the accounts imported from money to quicken but not all. Not all financial institutions I deal with particularly Credit Cards will download directly. I would take the quicken I used in the early 1990s over the product today. Somehow Intuit has managed to get worse with time that is why I switched to Money in the first place.

This program runs extremely slow and has bogged down to where it takes 30 sec - 1 min. just to post an investment transaction. AWindows are very slow to refresh or switch between. Tried to work with Intuit to solve this problem but they gave up. If you trade options, tracking it is all manual. Because there is no longer a symbol for options, the program can only manually record transactions and you will have to update your quotes manually. Most of the "features" are for complete beginners in handling money or investments - the budgeting and planning features are all just window dressing and have very little functionality. I used to enjoy using Quicken and started back in about 1993 or so. Starting in about 2000, the "improvements and features" started being frivolous and the program is now a paian to use for my purposes.

I have used Quicken since the late 80s, first on a mac, then with Quicken 96 I moved to windows. It was a great product, Now every upgrade is a downgrade and the feature bloat makes it impossible to find the usefull things I started using the product for. I really don't care that they get $150 a year for tax software and financial software, but when the new product is worse than the old and costs me time and frustration they should pay me. Give me a working download with Quicken 98 and I can do everything I need or want.

I really don't have time for the Qrap they are selling now. Why must their be four places to set up a new loan with different features exposed or hidden depending on which path I started from? Why does it tell me I can't change an address because I am not sending a check when I am in the print check dialog box? Why does Ctrl-P or Command-P print a register rather than print checks? Who needs a printed register? Get back to simple and dump all of the planning garbage or at least hide it so I don't need to look at it. Some things are meant to go in a spreadsheet, Filemaker, or God-forbid Access.

I saw good things about Moneydance and will probably download a copy and figure out whether the conversion of my Quicken data is overly difficult. Simple, downloads data, prints checks, and tracks spending against a budget and in tax categories I set up.

Don't tell me about the dark ages - I have four wheels on my car and even though someone might think a square one works better, the Egyptians and Romans got it working and there is no reason to change. I will use the latest version if the latest version works, but Vista, Quicken 2k or later, Office 2007, or Entourage for Exchange Server were all downgrades so why should anyone pay a cent for them?If you are not solving a new problem, I should not be buying a new solution. If you are forcing me to accept new problems as Intuit constantly does, they should pay me!