How to export the Lifetime Planner's plan.
Philip107
Member ✭✭✭
Quicken 2017 Premier, Windows 10
I don't see a way to export all the data from the complete plan. What you can do is click on an individual year to get the Income and Expense dialog to popup for that year. From here you can click the Print link and then select the export radio button.From the export drop down you can select the tab-delimited choice. This will print a tab delimited text file to your hard drive where you can then save that to Excel or whatever. Do this for each year and you'll have the entire plan.

I took it one step further and found I could use a screen macro program to have it automatically step through this process and create a file for each year in the plan automatically. The program I used is called Pulover's Macro Creator. It takes just a couple minutes for the macro to complete. I then created a small VB.NET program that consolidates all the individual tab delimited files into one tab file that I then import into Excel. I ended up having an Excel spreadsheet for my entire Plan. It is absolutely a must when you want to study the entire plan and observe the cash flow that is being prescribed.
My plan, out to the year 2055, prints out in landscape on 2 legal sizes pages. I would urge Quicken to add an export feature to create this tab delimited output with one click.

-phil
(Please Preserve-Part of an active Idea)
I don't see a way to export all the data from the complete plan. What you can do is click on an individual year to get the Income and Expense dialog to popup for that year. From here you can click the Print link and then select the export radio button.From the export drop down you can select the tab-delimited choice. This will print a tab delimited text file to your hard drive where you can then save that to Excel or whatever. Do this for each year and you'll have the entire plan.

I took it one step further and found I could use a screen macro program to have it automatically step through this process and create a file for each year in the plan automatically. The program I used is called Pulover's Macro Creator. It takes just a couple minutes for the macro to complete. I then created a small VB.NET program that consolidates all the individual tab delimited files into one tab file that I then import into Excel. I ended up having an Excel spreadsheet for my entire Plan. It is absolutely a must when you want to study the entire plan and observe the cash flow that is being prescribed.
My plan, out to the year 2055, prints out in landscape on 2 legal sizes pages. I would urge Quicken to add an export feature to create this tab delimited output with one click.

-phil
(Please Preserve-Part of an active Idea)
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Phil, nice trick using a macro to retrieve the individual year data. I've tried saving to tab delimited text files and compiling the individual text files into a spreadsheet a time or two, but it's quite an effort.
I recall you used to be able to export/print the Lifetime Planner data quite a few year versions ago, but had heard they disabled that feature as professional financial planners were using it to create financial plans.
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What exactly do you achieve by printing out your plan in landscape on 2 legal sizes pages full of Excel spreadsheet cells values.?
I suppose you want to use Excel for some kind of analysis.
What would that be ?
Unfortunately, the LTP automatically changes every time you open it, changing as it incorporates the new investment balances of "the day," assuming no other parameter changes to the underlying assumptions. Obviously, changing retirement dates, returns, salaries, etc., will also affect the new LTP picture.
This does not help the interest of wanting to compare plan to actual over a one year or five year horizon. By comparing the changing elements, the user can adjust his/her financial behavior to maximize his/her financial goals.
Rather than linking bills to Quicken (a cute but small value feature), a little effort on the LTP functionality would provide greater value to Quicken customers.
I would love to have better visibility of the Lifetime Planner data, including the changes that happen over time. And the reality is that I will never take the time to extract the date piece by piece into a spreadsheet, or build the macros to understand it better: Phil's "solution" does not work for most of us. We are just not quite that motivated or conscientious.