Then you will see a file backup window appears, choose the Backup path, and move it to the USB. Select Backup and Restore, and click Backup Quicken File. Open Quicken on your old computer, choose File option on the top left side.
Can Quicken Import From Windows Mac I GuessGives you the big picture in minutes. Easy to get started and keep going - Step-by-step guidance helps you get up and running fast. But no, here I am again with a First Look at Quicken Essentials for Mac I guess I’m a glutton for punishment or something.Easily import data - Easily import data from Quicken Essentials for Mac, Quicken Mac 2007, and Quicken 2010 for Windows or newer versions. Quicken supports.After all the exceedingly positive…oh wait, it was incredibly negative…response to my podcast discussion with Aaron Patzer, head of Intuit’s Quicken team, you think I’d run away from anything having to do with Quicken Essentials. Restore backup file on the New PC.The Mac version of Quicken offers a different set of options and abilities than the PC version but Quicken does support exporting your PC files so you can import them on a Mac.Now developed in Cocoa, you get all the benefits of the best OS X development environment—Services work, for instance, and if you’re used to various text field shortcuts (Control-A to jump to the beginngin of a field), those all work too. (For more on the history of Quicken and how Essentials fits in, read this article, by Jason Snell, about the release.) OverviewAs you may have read by now, Quicken Essentials is a ground-up rewrite of Quicken. What it is is an overview of the new program, and my observations after putting it to use for two days. For instance, on August 22nd, 1994, I paid $753 for a 1GB hard drive—ouch!)What follows is not a review of Quicken Essentials—we’ll have that done in the near future. Now, though, I’ve had the shipping version of Quicken Essentials on my machine for two days, and have given it what I consider the ultimate test: I fed it my Quicken 2006 data file, containing every financial transaction I’ve been involved with since 1993—nearly 17 years’ worth of data! (This is a depressing history to look through, so I try my best to avoid it.![]() Those who found Quicken overly complex for their basic needs will probably find Essentials perfectly satisfying.My test import worked quite well—it took about 30 minutes, and brought over every single transaction without any obvious failures. Those who utilize most of the features of Quicken 2006/2007 (especially related to investments, taxes, and paying bills within the program) will find Essentials disappointing. Accounts Summary presents a summary by account, though you can’t drill down into it.I think Quicken Essentials will get different responses from different people, based on their own backgrounds. That limitation? The investments section of the program is quite a letdown in this version. In Essentials, I just enter a filter term, and I see all matches in all accounts in one window—this is a huge advantage over the old program.Unfortunately, once I got beyond the look and the few cool new features, one key limitation in Essentials means that I’ll be keeping Quicken 2006 at least until the promised Quicken Deluxe comes out next year. In Quicken 2006, I have to run a search across all accounts, and it then pops up results as it finds them. Quicken Essentials is the first Intuit product I’ve used that truly feels and acts like a typical OS X application, and that’s a good thing.I also liked the visual reporting, the overview pages, and the filters, which are particularly useful for drilling back through large files. When double-clicking an entry in a register, Essentials brings it to the foreground and dims the background, making it clear which record you’re working on:Essentials calls out the entry you’re working on in a registerThe visual effects are smooth and well done, and rely on Core Animation. But compared to past data upgrade scenarios, this one was smooth and simple.The Cocoa rewrite brings tangible benefits—being able to use Services, for instance, and the standard text area keyboard shortcuts are most welcomed. (You can, however, rearrange the columns to suit your tastes, and add and remove columns so you see only what you need to see.)Thew new ‘pickers’ are very hard to useAnother issue is that the old Accounts and Categories windows have been replaced by something Essentials calls pickers. For me, though, I like to be able to easily see and work with my primary accounts without closing and/or shuffling windows, and I can’t do that in Essentials. So where I could easily see two windows side-by-side on our 20” iMac, I can’t do that in Essentials unless I size one of them to require horizontal scrolling.If you only look at one account at a time, this won’t be a problem. Essentials eschews the multi-row layout of Quicken’s registers for a much wider single-row columnar table.While this improves readability, it means you’ve got to have a really wide monitor if you want to look at two accounts side-by-side without scrolling. You’ll be forced to create a dummy “asset” account to just reflect the total value of your holdings, assuming you want Essentials to know about all your money.Quicken Essentials (top) uses wider windows than does Quicken 2006/2007 (bottom)Another limitation for me is the new layout for account windows. If you do any trading at all, and want information at hand instead of only on your brokerage’s web site, Essentials will disappoint you.Even worse is that if you happen to have accounts at an institution that doesn’t offer direct or web downloads of your data, you’re out of luck: There’s no way to manually enter securities and balances in Essentials. You must tediously click each and every item you wish to select, scrolling slowly through a hard-to-read list of bubbles. You can’t even drag-select multiple items. In the Reports section, you can’t select all of, say, Categories, and then unselect the few you don’t want. You can’t use the keyboard to select an item in the picker, you must use your mouse. There are pickers for not just category and account, but even payee.Unfortunately, using these pickers is just painful. I managed to crash the program twice doing nothing more than clicking on an item on the screen.For someone with a financial or accounting background, there are even issues with the display of numbers: Essentials shows liabilities as a negative number, which is completely wrong. I saw the spinning gear icon way too often when switching views or creating new reports. You can’t memorize transactions as you could in prior versions. So you’re on your own to figure things out, as I had to do with the custom reports.There are numerous other little things I found annoying: scheduled transactions appear in the register with no means to disable them. For more help, there’s a button that links to the Intuit Live Community, which is basically a forum-like web page that opens in your browser. You can’t avoid them when customizing reports, however, and that’s a real shame—with 100+ categories and 50+ accounts, the pickers are a substantial waste of time when creating reports.For a brand-new program, I was surprised to find that Essentials lacks any real built-in help there’s just a Getting Started manual. Windows left arrow for macWhile this may not bother everyone, it’s grabs my eye every time I see a screen in Essentials, because it’s just fundamentally wrong.So will Essentials succeed? Possibly—for those using Quicken who don’t rely on TurboTax integration, the investment tools, or the bill pay feature, Essentials will probably be a compelling upgrade, although I find the price a bit steep at $70 (with no discount for existing customers). They must be positive because of the basic accounting equation, Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity.)This problem extends to the account registers, too—payments are shown in red (good!) and as negative values (bad!), even though they’re in their own Payment column.
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