Review by Man in the Middle

I’ve been using Quicken for twenty years now, and usually upgrade only when the program really changes for the better. Thus, having purchased Quicken Deluxe 2011, I would not normally have expected to upgrade this year. However, I was happy to do so as a Vine reviewer.

Thus far, after a month of use, all I’m noticing is that the new version is a bit smoother in operation, and a bit less objectionable on the eyes. However, that is already an improvement over last year’s upgrade to 2011, which required a lot of effort on my part just to find everything and get everything working again afterwards.

This time the upgrade went smoothly. A few things to note: 1) the EULA (End User License Agreement) is as objectionable as ever. You have to agree in advance to whatever terms Intuit chooses to post on its Web site in future. On the bright side, you are now permitted to install the program on up to three computers in the same household. 2) The upgrade required a reboot afterwards. 3) The data format has changed again, so be sure to do a backup before upgrading. 4) On first use after upgrading, the old data is archived and upgraded. Likely best to get that out of the way before letting One Step Update do anything after the upgrade. 5) Afterwards, having been alerted a One Step Update had previously been missed, I did a One Step Update, and it now works on one bank with which it had trouble before. 6) In the lower right corner of the One Step Update window there was an alert about a further upgrade to release 3 being available, so I then installed that. Overall, a lengthy but not painful process.

The upgrade is safe but not essential for those who already have the 2011 version.

Update: I have become aware of one annoying behavior (bug?) that was also in the 2011 version. If I manually mark a transaction as Cleared while reviewing my account info on an account’s Web site, then later do a 1 Step Update of that same account, such a transaction will both not be recognized as a match and also not show up as an option for manually matching. At that point, even changing the transaction’s status to Uncleared does not allow it to be automatically or manually matched. The only solution I have found is to delete the downloaded transaction every time one step update is run.