Quicken Premier 2010
Posted by Stephen Cline on January 24th, 2010
Quicken Premier 2010 has all of the features of Quicken Deluxe–plus investment management tools to help track your portfolio performance and help maximize your investments. Provides comprehensive investing and planning tools. Click to enlarge. Helps you make better buy/sell decisions. Click to enlarge. Check in anytime to see exactly where your personal finances are for the week, month or year. Click to enlarge. See yo… Buy Quicken Premier 2010 at Amazon
I picked up QP2010 locally this afternoon. (I’ve been running QP2009 for the past year.) There doesn’t appear to be a lot of “new” features so much as GUI changes. BTW, after installing and before converting the data set, Q checks for and downloads updates. In the “About Quicken” window, QP2010 reports it’s running R2. I always upgrade early if not on day one, and this is the first time I’ve started with a release other than R1.
One really nice interface change is that it’s now possible to use the “classic” interface, and you’re able to turn off both the account bar and the new “action bar.” As always, we can turn off the tool bar if we wish. The “action bar” is rather like MS’s “ribbon” interface but not as elaborate or as space consuming. This feature allows users to regain some vertical space.
Instead of having the usual several-file data set, all Quicken data is now packaged in the *.QDF file. Prior to upgrading from QP2009, I copied my (multi-year) 20MB file set, bringing it down to 16MB in size. After upgrading to 2010, my data file was 19.9MB. Automatic backups are no longer numbered FILENAME1 through FILENAME5 (or whatever max number you choose). They’re named in the format:
FILENAME-ddMMMyyyy-hh-mm-ss.QDF-backup
Also, manual backups are saved in the format:
FILENAME-ddMMMyyyy.QDF-backup
(As is the case with Quicken 2009, you can turn off Quicken’s appending the date to the filename — manual backups only.)
Additional backups during the same day get a -1, -2, -3, etc. appended to the end of the date. For example:
MYFILE-11OCT2009-1.QDF-backup
The bug where “update balance” defaults to a seemingly arbitrary date (in my case the date of my last balance update) rather than today’s date, has not been fixed.
I haven’t tested for other bugs, as this one is the most annoying for me. Further, as I’ve been able to duplicate it on two different operating systems on four different machines (and others have reported the same phenomenon), it seems Intuit could fix this!
Intuit also failed to listen to those of us asking for the return of 2007’s (IIRC?) detailed category editor where we could actually see transactions linked to a given category.
That was a really useful feature. Now Quicken (as of Q2008 IIRC) simply reports that “if” the subcategory is in use when you delete it, its contents will be merged with the category. When I attempted to delete a category, Q warned that all subcategories would be deleted too. I don’t understand why Intuit removed this very useful feature, as it was already programmed and worked very well. Now we have to run category reports before doing any major revisions to categories & subcategories. 
I admit I don’t do such reorganizing very often, but it’s nice to have it when I need it!
I began using Quicken 3.0 for DOS when it first came out and have upgraded every year. The last few years I’ve paid full price and purchased Intuit’s download. This year Intuit seems to have dropped the ball and is still selling Q2009 on its web site (as of this writing). Amazon started shipping Quicken 2010 today (at a nice discount), but no download is available yet.
Even though there are no earthshaking improvements, the improvements to the GUI are very nice. There are a few new “summary” pages which help with watching where money goes, etc. Overall, IMNSHO, Intuit has made good use of screen real estate without wasting too much space or crowding screen elements. A lot of options are customizable, so Intuit did listen to us on that count.
(I run my machines at 1280×1024 and 1280×800.)
Another change is that by default, cents are not shown in the Account Bar. You have to right-click and select the option to “show cents in amounts” if you want to see this detail.
This is the first year there is no MS Money. I’m sure writing the Money-to-Quicken converter was a major undertaking — especially if it works well! The GUI improvements are very nice, and I do like QP2010. Still, I’m especially glad I paid nowhere near full price for it. Intuit says the Money-to-Quicken data converter will be available for Q2009 later in October.
During my cursory review this afternoon, I didn’t find any weirdnesses, and the program runs well.
Overall, I’d say Q2010 has a streamlined user interface that will appeal to new users. Intuit listened and added customization options where seasoned users can turn off many new interface changes. Also for new users migrating from MS Money, there’s a Money-Quicken data converter. As I haven’t used the converter, I don’t know how well it works. But it looks like Intuit has made a good, mature product easier for new users, and especially for Money users who want to switch to Quicken.
I am a former MS Money user and was looking forward to effortlessly importing my data files into Quicken 2010 as promised by Intuit. The reality so far is a nightmare. Before I continue I consider myself very knowledgeable in dealing with Computer and software issues. I purchased and attempted to install Quicken Premier 2010 on October 10, 2009. The software loaded without problems. When you first open the program you are given 3 options on how to proceed. I chose the option that says I want to import my data from MS Money. As soon as I selected this and clicked on the get started button, the program crashed. I closed and reopened the program, only to get to a new screen that does not show the previous choices. After various attempts to get back to the original screen failed, I opened a chat session with customer support. After a 30 minute wait, I was connected and an agent helped with an alternate method to import the Money data. The import was successful and I thought I was good to go. I closed the program. The next day I attempted to reopen the program and the system once again crashed. Numerous attempts to reopen also failed. I removed and reloaded software with the same problem. I then downloaded and used an Intuit cleaner program to remove all traces of Quicken. I also deleted some files and folders detailed on the Quicken website. After this, I was again able to install and open the program, however when I selected the option to import Money data it once again crashed. I have since been unable to reopen the program. Not wishing to remove and reinstall again, I went to the support page of Quicken to contact customer service by phone. I felt pretty good when it promised “I would be contacted within 60 minutes. Guaranteed.” Now I am unaware of what the guarantee means because I have been waiting for over 9 hours without a call back. I cannot recommend this product. If I do not receive a response by tomorrow, I plan to box it up and ship it back to Intuit for a refund. I will continue to use MS Money and update my portfolio and bank accounts manually. This product, and customer service does not live up to what they claim. Unless a fix is forthcoming, I say, save your money.
Update 11/3/2009: I am revisiting my original post because of the following:
1. Customer support has been great (although it took a lot of effort on my and others part)
2. I have imported 2 mny data files now with no problem. Part of the original problem I feel was because I did not install it as the Administrator. VERY IMPORTANT.
3. After using the program for several weeks, I am getting more used to it. Just a learning curve as it is very different from Money.
So, I would say at this point, make the purchase
I’ve been using MS Money since ~1998. My most recent version was 2007 and since its end of life is 2010 I figured that I would get a head start with the new Quicken version.
The good:
- The conversion of data from MS Money was surprisingly fast and easy. All of my accounts were there.
- Online access is available for more of my accounts than what I had in MS Money.
- The information is all there that you need. It works.
- I always had an issue with MS Money where when I was doing an online update it would recreate accounts a second time. I would merge the accounts manually and then most often it would happen again on the next update. The only way to fix it was to completely delete the account and start over which always irritated me because you would lose data in the process. I’m listing this under good because I’m assuming that I won’t have this issue with Quicken.
- My 12MB file in MS Money went down to 9MB in Quicken.
The bad:
- Man the Quicken interface is a mess. If you’re used to the clean and simple MS Money screens it’s going to take you a little time to adjust.
- You need to set up all of your online access to accounts again.
- There are other account settings here and there that need to be updated. Usually they are in hard to find spots.
- Reconciled transactions in MS Money for some reason don’t always show up as reconciled in Quicken. No big deal – you can do a select all and reconcile them all at one time in an account.
- Some categories were missing for transaction transferred from MS Money.