avoid Quicken for the Mac at all costs!

Now that it’s 2008, I can reflect on 2007, I suppose.  The single biggest mistake I made in my wholesale conversion from Microsoft Windows to Apple Mac OS in 2008 is this:  I tried to switch to Quicken Mac 2007.  If you’re considering going to the Mac version of Quicken, I encourage you to think twice.  The Mac version is by far inferior to the Windows version, in nearly every respect.  It’s slower, harder to navigate, buggier, less-featured, and uglier.

I wasted several hours of my life converting our Quicken data from the Windows version to the Mac version back in the summer, after I got Quicken Mac 2007 for my Mac mini.  After several months of unhappy use, I finally decided in December to get Parallels up and running on the mini, and then switch back to Quicken for Windows 2008.  Now I’m going through the conversion process to get my data back onto a Windows PC (virtual PC, that is).  And once again, it’s a royal pain in the ass that’s taken me several more hours.  And I’m still working on it.

You’d think that a company as big as Intuit would have a file format for their flagship product – Quicken – that works the same on Mac and Windows both.  But no such luck.  They’ve got a long webpage devoted to all the steps you are supposed to follow to convert from Mac to Windows.  I followed them to the letter, and ended up with Quicken data on Windows that didn’t add up to the same amount as it did on the Mac.  And it dated all my transactions since 1999 as being in the past century.  In other words, stuff originally dated 2002 was now dated 1902.  I finally gave up exporting data from Quicken Mac and importing on Quicken Windows, and now I’m re-building all my accounts from scratch.  Yuck.

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