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driven · Mar 4, 2005, 09:41 AM

I'm considering buying Quicken for Mac (after being a longtime user of MS Money).

Question:
If my bank doesn't offer a download option for "Quicken for Macintosh" can I use the "Quicken for windows" download option and will it work?

suthercd · Mar 4, 2005, 10:36 AM

My bank's and credit card sites don't distinguish between Man and Win formats. The bank option is to download a QIF or tab delimited formated file. Amex has options for a Money, Quicken, QIF or tab delimited d/l.

Is there still a Quicken demo available? If so, you can give it a try.

Craig

chabig · Mar 4, 2005, 10:55 AM

If the bank doesn't explicitly support downloads to the Mac (i.e., pay money to Intuit) then you can't download the data into Mac Quicken.

It's amazingly stupid, and it's all because Intuit charges banks separate fees for Mac and Windows downloads.

Chris

driven · Mar 4, 2005, 11:06 AM

Sounds like it's amazingly stupid on Intuit's part.

I may have to stick with Money running in Virtual PC or on my home box.
<sigh>

driven · Mar 4, 2005, 11:07 AM

Originally posted by suthercd:
My bank's and credit card sites don't distinguish between Man and Win formats. The bank option is to download a QIF or tab delimited formated file. Amex has options for a Money, Quicken, QIF or tab delimited d/l.

Is there still a Quicken demo available? If so, you can give it a try.

Craig

How well does this work?

I didn't see a demo yet. (Quite honestly I didn't even think to look.) I'll do that.

What do all of you use? Quicken or some other tool?

cpac · Mar 4, 2005, 11:16 AM

Couple of points:

(1) Your bank only needs specific Quicken for Mac support if you want to download the transactions directly into Quicken (without going through the web at all). Otherwise, Quicken can generally import .qif files that you download (which are the same, regardless of platform).

(2) Quicken is overpriced, a poor port, and all-around crappy. I MUCH prefer iBank which does a good job of importing .qifs I download from my bank/credit card websites, is quite intuitive, and has a fairly responsive developer.

You can download a demo of iBank and enter a bunch of transaction for free - A license, as I recall is about $20 or less than half the cost of Quicken.

Also, the developer mentioned in the support forums that he's aiming to release version 2.0 by WWDC, which should bring many of the features people have been asking for in iBank.

There are other options out there besides iBank, and even if you don't like it particularly, unless you really need some feature that's unique to Quicken, I'd ditch it completely.

driven · Mar 5, 2005, 10:22 AM

Ok ... I downloaded iBank .... seems kinda simple. It still might be able to do everything that i need it to do.

(It seems a little weak on the reporting side and the investment tools, that's all.)

QUESTION:

It has a feature to "sync with iWork". I didn't try this, but can someone tell me how the heck you sync a financial account with a Word Processor/Presentation package?

OptimusG4 · Mar 5, 2005, 11:21 AM

Originally posted by driven:
Ok ... I downloaded iBank .... seems kinda simple. It still might be able to do everything that i need it to do.

(It seems a little weak on the reporting side and the investment tools, that's all.)

QUESTION:

It has a feature to "sync with iWork". I didn't try this, but can someone tell me how the heck you sync a financial account with a Word Processor/Presentation package?

iWork was their product name before Apple came out with it. I believe they changed it to iBiz shortly before iWork was released from Apple.

driven · Mar 5, 2005, 11:31 AM

Originally posted by OptimusG4:
iWork was their product name before Apple came out with it. I believe they changed it to iBiz shortly before iWork was released from Apple.

Ahhhh ..... that's the missing piece of the puzzle. Doesn't seem so odd now ...