Quicken 2007, A Review: At Last!

In order to import my Microsoft Money 2007 data into Quicken 2007, I had to install Quicken 2005 first, import the Money 2007 data using the Data Converter, then start Quicken 2005 to finish the importing process, uninstall Quicken 2005, install Quicken 2007, then upgrade, and… finally done! It was a tedious process. But it works. Not everybody wants to jump through that many hoops though. At the end, though, I stayed with Money (due to Quicken’s stability issues).

My first impression of Quicken (both 2005 and 2007) before even starting it up is… wow! So many desktop icons (add to that the length of the icon titles)! Looks very spyware-ish to me:

When first starting up, Quicken gives you an express setup:

I never got to that because all I’m interested in is to convert my Money data to Quicken, or Quicken can wait forever.

At this point I tried to install Quicken 2005. Failed. I have to uninstall the failed Quicken 2005, then uninstall Quicken 2007, then reinstalled Quicken 2005. Done. Trying to import Money data into Quicken 2005… Successful. This is the Quicken 2005 Home page using the freshly converted data:

I had enabled multicurrency support in that. I find it weird that Quicken doesn’t enable multicurrency right from the start. After I enabled multicurrency support, I was frustrated to see them as dollars, not rupiahs, and seemingly there is no way to change this. It looks like Quicken doesn’t support Indonesian Rupiahs out-of-the-box. While I can add Indonesian Rupiahs manually using the Currency List, this is completely useless since Quicken can’t change the currency of existing accounts. Very frustrating, yet I bet none of these guys at Intuit actually care.

Then I uninstalled Quicken 2005 and replaced it with the shiny Quicken 2007 Home & Business. The upgrade process went without problems and I was presented with the brand new Home page:

At this point I have to correct many things that Quicken messed up during the conversion process. I have strong expectations on Quicken though, due to many good reviews. I hope I won’t regret my switch from Money 2007 to Quicken 2007. (later, it turns out that I do regret this switch…)

By the way I also tried to install Quicken 2007 under Linux using CrossOver Office… but failed. 🙁

Quicken 2007 is starting to give me a few problems though. It crashed while trying to update itself (no Internet connection, but why crashing?) Then at startup it says I have to uninstall then reinstall it because something is “wrong”. Oh great, as if I hadn’t uninstalled-reinstalled Quicken just that many times today (and different versions, too!)

Quicken seems to be designed with American users only in mind (in addition to the multicurrency issue). Things like taxes, etc. are exclusively for U.S. citizens. When I try to set up planning, I got this ridiculous underestimation:

Come on, I can’t even earn 100 million rupiahs per YEAR? (Now I know why Bill Gates won’t use Quicken.) At this point, besides getting frustrated, I also chuckled, in Turkey you’d do millions and billions-valued transactions daily (due to its Lira currency), I really wonder how Quicken would handle this? 😉

After I completed the Planning steps, Quicken crashed. I tried to restart it, but everytime I want to go to the “Financial Overview” page it always crashes:

This makes Quicken 2007 even more useless than Money 2007! Money has flaws in their Budgeting feature, which is very critical but not being able to access “Financial Overview” in Quicken 2007 is even more frustrating!!!

Final Conclusion: Uninstalled Quicken 2007, went back to Money 2007 Home & Business with its buggy Budgeting.

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