Add Report Formatting Options to Quicken for Mac (137 Legacy Votes) (+1 Merged Vote)

smayer97

It would be nice to be able to customize report formatting as follows:

• ability to change fonts and font sizing on different parts of the report (like in QM2007) 
• ability to change title [this now exists]
• ability to hide title
• option to 'Shrink Wide Pages to Fit" like in QM2007 [this now exists]
• ability to resize columns [this now exists]
• ability to add a page break where needed
• ability to access and adjust these options on the report directly to see the immediate impact

Click this link for requests for formatting options to Add More Sorting Options to Reports.

(If you find this feature helpful, please be sure to add your vote below this post to increase the count of this post and therefore its visibility to other users and to the developers.)

[Edited to update features which have been added, change in voting procedure, and broken links.    —jacobs 01/2022]

[See also this Idea post requesting improved print formatting]

smayer97

You may also want to add your VOTE to MANY types of reports and report features, here: https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/list-of-requests-for-report-types-and-related-fe...

Go take a look at the list and vote for the ones you want to see implemented in Quicken for Mac.

Be sure to click on the link above to go there, then click VOTE at the top of EACH page of THAT request in the list below to increase the count and therefore its visibility to the developers.

I also highly recommend that you browse through the IDEAS section of this forum and VOTE for the request of each of the missing features to be added back into Quicken for Mac.

To do that, I suggest you read this FAQ on how to filter the IDEAS to just show the ones for the Mac version, then VOTE to your heart's content:
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/quicken-getsat-faq-how-to-filter-conversations-d....

If you do not click VOTE at the top of the page each feature, your vote will NOT be counted!

(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)

smayer97

I also highly recommend that you browse through the IDEAS section of this forum and VOTE for the request of each of the missing features to be added back into Quicken for Mac....to help direct the priorities of the developers.

To do that, I suggest you read this FAQ on how to filter the IDEAS to just show the ones for the Mac version, then VOTE to your heart's content:
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/quicken-getsat-faq-how-to-filter-conversations-d...

The following are some of the many feature requests you will find:

• List of Requests for Report Types
• List of Requests for Report Related Features
  
• Restore Transactions Downloading Acceptance and Matching workflow 
• List of Requests for Reconciliation Process
• List of Requests for Bill Reminders (aka Scheduled Transactions) and Graph Features (aka Cash Flow Forecast or Projected Balance)
  
• Add QuickMath functionality
  
• Loan Amortization
  
• List of Requests Related to Investments
• True multi-currency conversion support
• List of Requests Related to Budgets
  
• List of Requests for Data Entry and Usability Options and Features
  
• List of Requests for User Interface Options and Features
  

and many others.

Click on each link above, then be sure to scroll down each page, as some contain lists of related features. Then VOTE on EACH IDEA separately that you are interested in.

If you do not click VOTE at the top of the page of each feature, your vote will NOT be counted for THAT specific feature!

(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)

smayer97

And forgot another important feature: be able to re-size columns.

(If you find this reply helpful, please be sure to click "Like", so others will know, thanks.)

Unknown

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Vote.


Allow custom column widths in reports in Quicken for mac(2017)

GarySzy

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Quicken 2018 Reports still need work....


Please put ‘report printing’ or ‘output’ high on the updating list.  Reporting should be like Q2007, clean & concise with the minimum amount of paper when printing.  Also, please give users the ability to change fonts, their sizes, and colors in the reports.  Thank you!

Unknown

Here Here! I've been complaining about reporting on QM ever since I converted from QM2007. My year end report on 2007 would print on 6 pages, QM17 same report...28 pages. Ugh!

Unknown

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Merging.


This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Allow adjust of column size on reports.Would like to adjust the columns width on printed reports.  As it is now when I attempt to print report of transaction the account takes up half the page.  My account names are not that long. The current setup prevents me from having all the info on one page.  Work around is to export csv file and print from Numbers.

Note: This conversation was created from a reply on: Add Ability to Set Default Columns, Sort and Sizes to Account Registers in Quicke....

Unknown

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Merging.


Report customization is key! Page Breaks, Font Size, Column width, Bold & color text options. Report customization should be a big priority with development team.

Note: This conversation was created from a reply on: Add Ability to Set Default Columns, Sort and Sizes to Account Registers in Quicke....

Unknown

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Merging.


This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Why is it taking so long to get some customization for report printing on QM18?.QM18 is great except for the ability to customize report printing. A report that was 20 pages on Q2007 is over 196 pages when printed with QM18!

Note: This conversation was created from a reply on: List of Requests for Report Types in Quicken for Mac.

stan

merged from "User Formatting of Quicken for Mac Reports"

I used Quicken for Windows for many years before I bought my iMac and became used to having quite a lot of the report formatting under user control. Quicken for Mac reporting could be so much more user friendly with some simple additions such as: making graphs optional; report titles printing on each page (optional); control of font & size; control column widths; and control of pagination. l would like to submit a simple Net Worth Report to show how unprofessional that report looks now and how simple it would be to make it look so much better. Can this be done?

Woods37

I used Quicken for Windows before I bought my Mac. There are a lot of features in the Windows version that I would like to see in the Mac version.

Export a budget report to Excell.

Change font on reports especially the budget report. I am 82 years old and have trouble reading the report. Also, be able to change the font colors.

Be able to select the data range for the budget report. Such as Jan 1 thru June 30, not get the whole year.

I don't use Quicken for investing or downloading. Just use it for simple banking and budgeting. It would be great if there was a simple way to start a new year with the prior year categories and just uncleared transactions.

Thank you

jacobs

@stan and @Woods37 There are "old" and "new" reports in Quicken Mac. The old reports are the ones on the bottom of the Reports menu. They were inherited from the Quicken Essentials predecessor program to the current Quicken Mac, and have little-to-no formatting capability. Over the past few years, the developer shave been working on a new reports engine that gives users greater control over output. These are the "Create…" options on the Reports menu. The new reports overlap the old reports, but aren't complete enough for them to remove the old reports yet. But wherever possible, you should use a new report.

• All new reports can be exported to Excel
• You can set custom date ranges, as well as filter selected accounts, payees or tags
• You can't change the font, but…
• You can hide and show columns
• You can rearrange the order of the columns
• You can change the width of the columns
• When printing, you can control scaling so the report will be 1 or 2 pages wide

Hopefully in the next few updates, they will create a net worth/balance sheet type new report so they can start removing the old reports that cause users confusion. It's coming; we just don't know how soon.

Mimi'sMac

This is the latest comment I could find , and it's now April 2021, and I'm having trouble printing a report that does not fit on a portrait page, does not have page breaks, and no font or margins adjustments. Terrible waste of space and paper. I used Quicken 2007 for years, and would like to see the same report formatting brought back. Has there been ANY movement on this deficit in the last year?

jacobs

@Mimi'sMac  There is no margin control, but the reports don't have excessively large margins. There is no way to manually control page breaks at a specific spot. But… you can click a checkbox in the print dialog box to scale to fit 1 (or more) pages wide, which is pretty much the same as Quicken 2007's "Shrink wide pages to fit". So you definitely can make a report fit on a portrait page by checking this button; whether it is too tiny to read depends on how many columns of data you have, and how wide you have them.

I'm not sure how the absence of page breaks causes the new Quicken to waste paper; page breaks make reports the same or longer than they would be without page breaks; no page breaks doesn't make the report longer. If you're playing with adjusting your columns and column widths, I suggest selecting print and then selecting "Open in Preview" from the PDF pull-down menu in the print dialog box; this allow you to see how the report is fitting and breaking without wasting any paper; I sometimes check preview, adjust my columns, check preview again, and only print when I have the report in satisfactory format. 

Mac Customer

> @jacobs said:
> @Mimi'sMac  There is no margin control,........
Thanks for responding to Mimi. I also would like to know any recent movement and have tried to follow your comments over the years. Do you have a recent comprehensive assessment posted that I may read? My needs are for simple General Ledger, Income, and Balance Sheet reports. Also something to take the place of QuickReport capability. Happy to pay for a stand-alone product that accesses my Quicken data.

jacobs

@Mac Customer Sorry, I don't have a comprehensive report written about reports... but I'm happy to try to answer any questions.

As you know, Quicken Mac isn't built as a business product -- but you can get the reports you asked about. Balance Sheet? The Net Worth report is essentially a balance sheet: the value of every account, grouped by assets and liabilities, as of a specific date. Income Statement? It's a Category Summary report. General Ledger/Trial Balance Report? It's a Transaction Detail report.

When you ask about a replacement for Quicken 2007's QuickReports, there is not a direct one-to-one replacement, but you can do many of things you used to be able to do. Clicking on a transactions, you can Control-Click to generate a report on the Payee or the Category. Many things we used to use QuickReports for are now accomplished using Search. You can select one account, one type of accounts (e.g. credit card) or all accounts, then search for a Payee, a Category, a Memo, an Amount… and the resulting register crisply can be printed or exported as a report. (Extracting selected lines from split transactions in this way doesn't currently work, though.) I've found that most of the things I used QuickReports for are doable with either Search or Reports in modern Quicken Mac. 

There are no third-party products which access Quicken Mac data, to the best of my knowledge. 

jacobs

@Mac Customer  Some additional notes about other features, present or missing in Quicken Mac reports…

You can't change the actual font. I know some people want this functionality; to me, it's a non-issue. The reports print in a legible sans-serif font (Helvetica).

You can't specify a fixed point size for the type, nor do you have control over margin settings. But you can control how much fits onto a page, which means you indirectly control the font size. You control which columns appear in a report, and how wide they are, to give the report its basic form. Then in the print dialog box, there's a setting for fitting to one page wide, or 2 or more pages wide. The combined effect of these setting sallows you to get the text size small enough to fit on a page or two if you want, or large enough to be more legible. It may take a few quick trial-and-error attempts (using Print Preview) to tweak things to the way you want for a particular report.

• There is no functionality to add manual page breaks.
• There is no functionality to change the font colors (e.g. specifying negative values in red).
• Report titles can be easily edited. You cannot suppress the report title or legend (e.g. date range, numbers of accounts or categories) from printing. (But you can export to Excel should you really need to.)

Others might disagree, but to me, report legibility is not a problem.

• There is no functionality to place subtotals below rather than above the data being summed.
• There is limited control over sorting and subtotals. You can set sorting order to some extent within the structure of the report (e.g. in a Category Summary report, you can click the Payee column to sort by Payees within each category). ou cannot manually set a specific fields for multiple levels of subtotals (for instance, subtotal by tag, within subtotaling by category or subtotal by category within subtotaling by tag). 

There are areas I still hope to see the developers m are improvements on in the future. 

graepers

I have to disagree. The ability to change font, specify page breaks, manually change margins, are very much needed. I am aware of the "Fit to One Page" on the print menu, but when I do, the font size ends up being mice type and unreadable. Example: an annual Category Detail report in Quicken for Mac 2007 could be customized to fit the information across one page and the entire report with readable font would end up being about 15 pages. The same report in the new Quicken for Mac Version 6.2.1 is 136 pages. That is unacceptable. When attempting to export the data to an Excel Spreadsheet, the process is cumbersome, and sometimes totally undoable since data becomes skewed and columns do not add properly.

I think report editing capabilities like what was available in Quicken 2007 should be the developers top priority.

jacobs

@graepers  Unlike Quicken 2007's "Fit Wide Pages to Fit", Quicken Mac allows you to fit to 1, 2, 3 or more pages wide.

Perhaps I'm not understanding what you do in Quicken 2007 to make a readable report that you can't accomplish relatively similarly in Quicken Mac. In Quicken 2007, the default font was Geneva, which is similar to (actually slightly wider than) the Helvetica Neue font in Quicken Mac. You can remove columns (as you could in 2007). You can narrow columns (as you could in 2007). You can change orientation (as you could in 2007). And you can fit to 'x' pages wide (similar but more flexible than 2007). I can understand with some differences in the report layouts that things might break a little differently, so at worst, I'd envision a 15-page report requiring an extra page of width if you didn't want the type too small -- but that would be 30 pages, not 136 pages.

If it's possible for you to do a screen shot of a piece of a Quicken 2007 report and its equivalent in Quicken Mac, I'd be interested to see if we could get them more similar than you're describing.

Note that I'm not suggesting that margin control and other tweakability of reports isn't desirable; I just haven't seen that it's as extreme an issue as your description here. 

I have not experienced problems exporting data to Excel. I wonder if you were doing this using some of the original Quicken Mac reports (e.g. Category Summary) which are being phased out, or if this is happening with the modern reports engine?

Mac Customer

@jacobs Thanks for both of your posts. You are most generous to help out the way you do. I would add more but I don't want to chance being marked OT.

I'm concluding that for now improvisation is a good friend. I had hopes when the June survey was about Reports; that we were getting close to a user controlled report writer. But why the use of Survey Monkey when there are dedicated volunteers like you (and @smayer97) is a puzzle.

I plan to use all your very helpful tips. Thanks again!

graepers

@jacobs I cannot reproduce a Category transaction report in Quicken 2007 because that program has long been deleted. However in setting up a Category Transaction detail report for 2020 the report ends up being 248 pages. When I go to print and scale the document to 1 page wide the report compresses to 29 pages but the type is so small it is barely readable. I have attached screen shots of each.

[Edited - Screenshots Removed for Customer's Privacy & Security]

jacobs

@graepers Thanks for the screen shots; it helped me see what you were describing a bit better. 

I can't say you can do it quite as space-efficiently in Quicken Mac as you could in Quicken 2007, but with some tweaking, you might find you can get in a reasonable ballpark.

I entered just a couple dummy versions of your accounts and transactions in a test file, in order to create a report that closely mimicked your, and then tried to see what I could do to save space.

So, here's are a few transactions in a report, as you'd see it on your screen. I included the columns in your report, and some transactions just to show the widths are ballpark comparable to yours:




Now, I printed this report, telling Quicken to fit it one one page. Just like yours, it makes everything fit, but the font is pretty small:


Then I removed the fit to one page wide setting, and showed that the report now sprawled to three pages wide to display all the columns. (I forgot how it annoyingly wastes the left side of each page repeating the categories, although I guess one needs to be able to line the pages up.)

So here's what I got on page 1:



And page 2:



And finally page 3:


This may not exactly match your results, since I don't ave all your data and was just guessing on column widths, but I think it reasonably simulates what you showed in your screen shot. 


So where do we go from here? I did something which may seem counterintuitive: I made it less legible on-screen, in order to get a better printed version. Here's what I made it look like on-screen:



All the column widths are greatly reduced, and some look significantly truncated. (If you want an optimal version for on-screen and an optimal version for printing of the same report, you can duplicate and save it as two reports with the different settings applied.) Why do this? Because when Quicken tries to print this, it will try to scale the columns, and compress the text width, to get as much actual text/data in each one as possible. As a result, here's what I get when I set it to print one page wide:


When you compare that to the images above of the 3-page wide report, you'll see the text size is a little smaller -- it has to be to get everything here to fit -- but not too much smaller. And compare it the original report which had been set to print one page wide, repeated here…


…and see how much more readable it is now compared to that original report!

Again, I know this is just a quick mock-up and doesn't contain your real data, but I think it reasonably shows that you can get a lot in Quicken Mac reports with some tweaking/experimentation with the column widths and settings, without settling for too-tiny text. (Also, make certain you need every column you're including in reports. Do you need Action, for instance? Maybe you do, but if not, all your other column sizes can expand a little and the font size will increase slightly.)

Could Quicken make this better? Yes… but in limited ways. The ability to minimize margins would help. Being able to reduce or eliminate the indents for sub-categories and sub-sub-categories would save some space. But after that…? I don't think setting a font size would help much; picking a larger fixed font size would drive the report to multiple pages in width, right back where you started. It might if the report builder screen what a what-you-see-is-what-you-get variety, so screen and print are exactly matched -- but that would give up the current flexibility to design wide reports which are easy to view onscreen. (And many users likely spend as much or more time with on-screen reports than their printed versions.)

I know this doesn't solve every issue, but I hope it might give you some new ideas on getting more usable reports in the current incarnation of Quicken Mac. 

graepers

@jacobs

I can’t begin to thank you for the effort you are going through to make my reporting in Quicken for Mac a bit better. Your examples 1, 2 and 3 came across in your response, so I could see what you were trying to show me. That's great!

Again, thank you for the time you have spent. But, I guess my ultimate point is that the developers should spend more time in helping us customize reports, so we wouldn’t need to go through the steps you are showing and the work arounds you are attempting. While there is a way to do almost anything through cumbersome processes, the developers would better serve the consumer by making those work arounds easier for the end user.

I am still advocating for better report customization.

Thanks again,

Steve

jacobs

Steve, yes, I agree that some changes could make things better… or easier… or more intuitive. I was just noting near the end that some things users may think will make life easier -- specifying the font size in a report, for example, may actually not be so helpful, and might be an old way of achieving something a modern report engine can do by automatically scaling the text to the maximum feasible size. 

Since I don't get to create the code, though, I try to find ways to work with what we've got in better ways. And to advocate for future changes as well.  

Best wishes!

jacobs

@graepers  P.S. I'm not sure if some of the account names in your screenshots are showing actual bank account numbers, but on the chance that they are, even though there's an extremely slim chance that would be problematic -- I've sent a message to a moderator asking them to remove your screenshots for safety of your data. 

jacobs

Mac Customer said:

I'm concluding that for now improvisation is a good friend. I had hopes when the June survey was about Reports; that we were getting close to a user controlled report writer. But why the use of Survey Monkey when there are dedicated volunteers like you (and @smayer97) is a puzzle.

@""Mac Customer" I do believe the developers listen to users, but they get so many ideas, it's hard to determine which ones to tackle in what order. I have actually suggested this type of short, topical survey to the moderation team.

Here's why. The Idea threads on this site are sprawling, even for someone like me who spends a lot of time here. (By my rough count, there are about 600 Idea requests for Quicken Mac alone.) Many users don't take the time to look, or aren't successful in finding, existing Idea threads of interest/importance to them. Sometimes the descriptions don't match what someone searches for, or aren't clear. Sometimes searching or browsing the ideas is just too daunting. So we get duplicate Ideas, which are sometimes merged, and similar but not identical Ideas which are sometimes merged and sometimes not. And we see the result here: relatively low voting due to this sprawl and the not-great voting interface on this platform. (This Idea post had 137 votes on the prior platform, but only 14 over the past 16 months since moving to this platform.)

Then you have the organization efforts of @smayer97, which were groundbreaking and immensely useful when the new Quicken Mac first came out nearly 7 years ago. The forum platform at the time had no organization compared to the current one which has categories and subcategories which help with some degree of organization. But over time, problems developed with a lot of those old Idea posts, many of which were cross-posted on multiple other threads -- was that many of the links got broken as the forum moved from one platform to another to another. Additionally, many of the Idea post threads are long and talk about a mix of things; in many cases, parts of individual Idea posts have been implemented while others haven't. (This thread is a good example: three of the original six bullet points requested in the first post of this thread have been implemented over time, while the other three remain. And the discussion posts which follow add additional wrinkles and insights.) It would take an immense effort to go back through and intensively edit many of the threads and posts to delete things which have been implemented and re-focus on things which haven't. No one's going to do that on a large scale.

So short, simple periodic surveys on different aspects of the product could be a way to engage more Quicken users to say what they consider most important to them today, so there's more input from more people to the developers. I hope in future surveys they'll even ask users to rank the ideas in importance; forced ranking can provide a lot of insight into not just what would be a good idea or a nice addition, but what is really most important to the most number of users. I don't know if they'll get good response to the surveys, or if the results will be all over the map, but it seems like a pretty easy way to try to get more user input. My 2¢…

Mac Customer

Your 2 cents should be pure gold to any moderator who happens to read this. Thanks for the comprehensive review. I experienced trying to vote but was thwarted in doing so by the process in place at the time(s). Hope they try a quick forced rank shot, and with feedback. They have the data base of emails. Response rate would provide additional insight; perhaps lead to improving the communication process. They would be wise to involve both you and @smayer97 for a quick pre-post review. Like an extended use of your Beta status. Thanks again, John

Richard Patterson

This is hardly a new idea, but it seems nothing has been done to permit changing the font or margins on a report in Quicken for Mac.  
The font on a report is almost illegible and the left edge of the report gets obscured if it is printed on 3-hole paper and bound.

MargBuch_2023

Want to ditto this request for formatting options in printing reports on the Mac. It seems support for Quicken on the Mac continues to lag behind what is offer for Windows. I want my report to fit on as few pages as possible. There are huge spaces between columns and the type is tiny. Not acceptable.

jacobs

MargBuch_2023 said:

There are huge spaces between columns and the type is tiny. Not acceptable.

In the on-screen version of the report, make the columns narrower. The printed report doesn't follow the spacing of there on-screen report exactly, but it does so in a somewhat proportional way. With trial and error (Print to Preview; you don't have to waste paper doing this), you can adjust the columns to reduce some of the excess space, which will in turn make the text larger if it is being scaled to fit.

Also, if you haven't done so, consider switching the report from portrait to landscape orientation; that allows a lot more text per line and/or larger scaling of the font.

These are just limited workarounds which may help a bit. It is not to suggest that we don't want and need more control over printed reports, including margins, page breaks, font and font size.