- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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1.5 stars
"Q2006 User Interface Very User Unfriendly vs Q2002"
Pros: MSMoney Import Didn't Work So Still With Quicken Since 1985
Cons: Terrible User Interface - Data Entry in Register or Investments - But it's the most used function
Summary: I've used Quicken since it's DOS versions in the mid 1980's. I've captured multiple Bank Acnts, Investment Acnts from various countries (wasn't till the late 90's this was reasonably easy).
Up until this release, I've been able to manually enter complex financial investment statements by hand since many aren't online partners. I was happy with Q2002 having upgraded many times, but found I had all I needed in Q2002. Their online sun-setting policy for older versions forced me to finally switch again. (For those considering changing to MS MONEY,I tried it but the data transfer produced too many errors, so stayed with QKN)
The whole interface in Q2006 is a step way back from Q2002. By area:
Investment Register Date Field: Once you've selected the date field with your cursor, you can't see the whole date that you're editing. The last two digits of the year are hidden! If you're editing information from a previous year, you can't see if the date is 2006 or older year until you've move to the next information field. In older versions if you started entering older data, the date field would stay as the last date entered, so you could just continue to use the + or - key to increment the date. No longer, now the date field reverts automatically to today's date, meaning you have to change all date information each time.
Type of transaction: There are a number of standard transactions that now force you to use a form that is much less convenient than using the register directly
Security Name: This is a real disaster. You can't see the whole security name any more! The auto-complete function is now useless. As you type the first few chars of the security name, it selects names that are similar, but unfortunately you can only see about 10 characters. Most of my bonds/ funds have many more chars and many start with the same 10 char's. You can use the alt-down arrow to see a the drop down menu of names. This is a strange backstep in user friendliness especially since the reason the security field is so small is to give a huges amount of space to the transaction description, that is generated automatically once you've entered in all the data.
In summary, there have been too many other real inconveniences put into this Q2006. It is as if all the user feedback from the DOS versions I started with through to Q2002 were thrown out. It is inconceivable that they'll leave it like this, but in reading the user forums to see if I had set it up incorrectly, I see that these 'dis'improvements from Q2002 have been in some of the other versions between Q2002 and Q2006. It seems that Q is no longer the easy to use tool that I'd come to love. At least I loved it until they forced me to change by eliminating the online capabilities that I had paid for.
This is a review after a few days, I'll pass on more 'dis' or actual improvements as I discover them.
