Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Per my usual procedure, I upgrade my copy of Quicken every other year. From what I can see, Quicken 2005 has hardly changed from Quicken 2003 (not necessarily a bad thing). Some things that I have noticed as being different are that:
- The program seems to load just a tad faster than before. On my 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 computer, my 19MB Quicken file changed from loading in about 2 seconds to loading in about 1 second. Insignificant, but noticable. On the esoterically theoretical downside, the Quicken 2005 upgrade process changed that same file from 16MB to that 19MB.
- The upgrade process suggested that I change my investing account so that the "checking" side of the account was reflected in one account instead of its existing two accounts. When I agreed, it processed the account and told me it didn't work right. Instead of reversing the change, it told me to restore a backup and leave the account as it was (unfortunately, it wasn't very specific about which account had problems or what they were). Not a big problem (since Quicken automatically made that backup when I started the upgrade). But, it could have been handled better.
- It appears that it's no longer possible to enter investment transactions directly in an account's register: you have to bring up a form dialog and enter the data there. If you enter such transactions only rarely, this isn't much of a problem. However, if you batch process a bunch of these, using that form gets tiresome pretty quickly.
- Unlike Quicken 2003 Deluxe, Quicken 2005 Premier allows you to set up scheduled transactions like dividends/interest in investment accounts. I'd have been happier if the program had noted dividend payments in the data downloads and automatically set up such quarterly scheduled payments. But, still, this is a good thing.
- With Quicken 2003, I was getting frequent error messages about my brokerage uploading data for accounts which didn't exist in Quicken. Those messages seem to have disappeared.
- When Quicken 2003 tried to download a quote for a stock which didn't exist in its data base, it popped up a warning screen and stopped the download until you accepted it. Quicken 2005 continues on without user intervention (a good thing, to me).
- The Quicken 2005 icon is UGLY and non-professional. I guess it's supposed to be a yellow dollar sign on a red-filled circle. Unfortunately, it looks like the "S" on Superman's outfit.
- Intuit seems to be practicing some type of "version-creep." From what I could decipher from the box and from Intuit's web site, I had to buy Quicken 2005 PREMIER to get the same investment capabilities I had in Quicken 2003 DELUXE. It's apparently a way of sneaking in a price increase. I don't mind the price increase so much as the fact that if I hadn't examined their table of capabilities, I would have automatically bought the DELUXE version and been unable to do the things I did with the old version. Irritating and potentially very bad from a customer-retention viewpoint.
- As others have noted here, Intuit is in the process of phasing out the use of QIF files. As I've never downloaded such things from my financial institutions, that doesn't affect me. The only worry I have is that this is yet another attempt by Intuit to lock people into their program (i.e., no data exchange). I haven't tried it yet, but there is an option to export REPORTS to Excel or to the clipboard (EDIT: I've now tried the Excel export and it's just the old export to a tab delimited file -- nothing new). If I could do that with an entire data file, that would be good. I'm not too sure about doing it with only what you can generate in a report, though. Also, as a work-around for importing QIF files to Quicken, I've seen messages that if you create a CASH account as a temporary working account, you can import your data there and then use Quicken's MOVE command to get the data in the proper account. Not elegant, but usable if you need it.
- I don't use the service, but from some articles I've read (do a Search on CNet), Intuit has changed the service it uses for online bill paying. It used to use CheckFree. With Quicken 2005, it uses Metavante. This, alone, doesn't seem to be much of a problem. But, the Quicken 2005 install process AUTOMATICALLY, and WITHOUT NOTIFICATION, changes your existing CheckFree account over to Metavante. Some people are rather upset about this (I would be too, if I used that service). There doesn't seem to be any way to opt out of, or reverse, that change.
All-in-all, I'm happy with the upgrade. It's not earth-shattering, so I don't recommend everyone run out and buy it. But, if you feel it's time to get a newer version of Quicken, there's nothing blatently wrong with this version and there are a few nice additions.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Quicken 2005 Premier
Quicken 2005 Premier offers smarter categorization of your spending, better management ofyour categories and total control of your investments. Its exclusive tools help you invest,monitor your net worth and optimize your returnBack up and archive your Quicken files and export to an Excel spreadsheet more easily
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