It’s okay

Difficult to use

I am/have been a long time PC user and used Microsoft PC based applications extensively with variable results. Having recently dipped my toe into the Mac world I needed to obtain the MS Office application for Word, Excel and Powerpoint applications that I could shuttle back and forth to work where we are mired in PC’s. I was really surprised at the commonality of the MS Office applications bewteen the two operating systems and the seamless interoperability of the files.

Migrated from Microsoft Money 2004 to Microsoft Money 2005 last week and have been fighting with the program to get it to run properly. Spent an hour with Microsoft support in Bangalore this morning - they were very knowledgeable and tried to be helpful but they couldn’t get a net worth report to run without the program crashing. Like most Microsoft programs. before version three, let it be. I’ll wait a few weeks until they offer another update patch to see if that works unless they recall the software and refund my money.

First, unlike many reviewers here, I am new to Quickbooks. I do have a business, and have tried some cheaper software (Peachtree, for one) without much success. Since my business is small, I could get by with a paper ledger, check register and Word–but it wasn’t pretty and the record keeping and invoicing was clumsy and really inefficientnnSo, for me, as a small business owner with a currently unsatisfactory accounting system and no previous Quickbooks experience, this was really great.

I liked using this program. As a photographer, I like to use photo editors for more than fixing the photo problemscropping, sharpening, adjusting hue, etc. If you primarily want to adjust your photosfixing them as photos including adding some color enhancements–there are several other very good, much less expensive programs like Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop Elements that do that. This is a pretty expensive program and I wouldnt get it unless I felt it did something that I couldn’t do less expensively elsewhere (or couldn’t do at all elsewhere) or unless it made something much easier to do than a less expensive program did.

I’ll update the review after a while of using it. For now, it seems to work fine. The installation went without problem (I uninstalled all of my previous security software first). It works as described so far, but as everyone knows, you really can’t be sure how well a security program is working until you’ve used it for aa while and it’s been tested by real attacks. So, so far so good.

Easy to Install. This Norton gave me a choice of installing from the disc or from the internet. I prefer doing it from a disc–most now want you to do it from the internet–so that choice worked well for me. The first computer already had Norton 360 on it, which the install noted was more comprehensive than this one. That’s good it does that, in case you have previously put Norton on it and aren’t sure which is more effective.

I was very glad, several years back, to find Toast 10 which was so much more versatile and easy to use than iDVD. That said, I have mixed feelings about Toast 12. It is now far more versatile in the music and video you can capture and convert and its nice to easily burn the discs. It’s very good at that…nice to be able to easily add voiceover to video. It does some things with conversions that many of the (easier, more affordable) video editors for PC don’t, so that’s something, since the software choices for Mac are so limited.

I tried using this for my home business, but my business is too small for it to be effective. This product is definitely meant for something with a few employees and more input and output flow than what I do. I did notice that it took up a lot of the memory and slowed down my boot up considerable, though. So I would recommend this product to someone who has a medium size business from home with an up-to-date computer system that can afford monthly fees to additional services like Paypal.