Add option for 2-line/row display in Quicken For Mac (175 Legacy Votes +2 Merged Votes)

jacobs

@GK49 Ever since the modern Quicken launched in 2014, some people have asked for the return of the 2-line register we were used to in Quicken 2007. I was one of them… initially. I found the one-line register a jarring departure from what I was used to. People have different experiences and reactions to user interfaces, so I can only share my own experience that as I used the new interface over time, I came to appreciate it and eventually to like it much more than the older 2-line display. I used the old and the new programs concurrently for several years, and by the time I bid by final adieu to Quicken 2007, the register interface seemed dated and inferior to me. (I recently fired up Quicken 2007 on an old computer to help answer a user's question, and I found the old 2-line interface very jarring.) But it takes using it a bit to come to that conclusion, so if you're only taking a glancing look at it without using it, you'll never have to possibility of discovering whether you might find you like it.

I find that skimming up and down a register looking for something is much, much easier when every line has the same fields in the same place; looking at and scrolling through screens where every other line has different fields is more difficult for the brain to process. The single-line register in modern Quicken Mac has the advantages of allowing you to show or hide whichever field you want, put them in the order you want, adjust the width of each column as you want — and you can vary this for different accounts depending how you use them. (Simple example: check number used to be near the left for checking registers, but as I now write very few checks I have it moved to the far right so I don't need to tab through this field I use very infrequently.) Smooth scrolling up and down is also far more pleasant than jumping a screen at a time forward or backward in Quicken 2007. Again, I'm just sharing my personal thoughts; I know not everyone will agree with them.

The two-line display was born (in both Quicken Windows and Quicken Mac) back in the 1980's, when most users had a 12" monitor with 640 pixels of width; it was the only way to show enough data about each transaction. Today, most users run Quicken on desktop monitors which are 21" to 27" wide, but even on my 13" laptop, the horizontal resolution is 2,560 pixels — four times more than when Quicken was originally designed.

A former product manager for Quicken Mac once explained that the register interface in modern Quicken Mac is powered by a lot of user interface tools built into the Mac operating system for displaying lists of data, which meant it was faster to create and easier to make enhancements to. He said that building a 2-line interface like Quicken 2007 would require them to forego all the built-in tools they use for building the existing register screens and to build the entire screen-drawing code from scratch, which would be a major programming undertaking.

There's an existing request for this functionality, which a moderator will likely merge your post and this reply into; it shows a status of "Under Consideration", which means the developers have not rejected it, but they also haven't committed to it or allocated dates on their schedule to built it.

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I wanted to make an additional comment about your commitment to stick with Quicken 2007 on old computers unless this particular change is made. While I acknowledge that you are not alone among Quicken 2007 die hard users out there, I encourage you to be aware that you are operating on borrowed time and face some risks in following this approach indefinitely.

First, while Quicken 2007 has been a workhorse for a very long time, it has a notoriously imperfect database which is prone to occasional data corruption. Some problems are quickly cured with the utility for rebuilding the transaction file indexes, but others can appear without warning. I once discovered a cluster of transactions in one account had disappeared, with some of them reappearing in a different date range. When I came upon this problem, it was too late to revert to a prior backup. I also ran into hitting the maximum number of transactions in the database, forcing me to either delete some old transactions or split my data file into two. You might have no problems running Quicken 2007 for another 5 years, but if you do encounter a problem, there are no tools and no support to help you recover.

Second, in order to migrate data from Quicken 2007 to modern Quicken Mac requires a multi-step conversion utility, part of which runs on a Quicken server. At some point, I imagine Quicken may determine it's not worth maintaining that server for the small number of remaining active Quicken 2007 users who might ever decide to convert their data. If they do decide to shut down the conversion server, it will hopefully come with some form of advance warning — but sometimes these changes happen unexpectedly. (For instance, imagine something happens to blow up the conversion server, and their attempts to restore it from a backup are unsuccessful; they then have to decide whether to task an engineer with days or weeks of work to rebuild the conversion server or not.) They have stats to assess how large the remaining Quicken 2007 user base is, and I would be concerned that at some point, the conversion path which has existed for many years may disappear. I don't want to be accused of falsely riding the alarm bell, as I have no indication that such a change is coming — I'm just connecting the dots and warning that it might happen in the future.

Quicken Anja

Hello @GK49,

Your idea has been merged into this already active Idea thread regarding the same request.

Thank you!

smayer97

Just to be clear, it is not a one-line interface that allows all the current capabilities ("show or hide whichever field you want, put them in the order you want, adjust the width of each column as you want — and you can vary this for different accounts depending how you use them.", it is just that current QMac was built from the ground up with only a single line display, so it would take some work to create a 2-line UI with all the same capabilities… and herein in the challenge.

Though each has its benefits, I still contend that a 2-line display still has significant benefits, even on 27" wide screens.

In the meantime, if you need to continue using QM2007, QM2007 does not have a transaction count. What you can do is import QM2007 data into QMac Classic and use its transaction count to see how close you are to the QM2007 total transaction limit of 65,535 (2^16-1).

And as long as you maintain an Intel Mac, you might consider using a VM to continue to run QM2007 on a Mac with a newer operating system.

see: Share your experience running QM2007 in a Virtual Machine (VM)

Note that VMWare Fusion is now free for personal use, since v12. And very recently v13 PRO has now become free for personal use.

https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2024/05/fusion-pro-now-available-free-for-personal-use.html