Quicken for Mac 2018 v5.2 Released

Quicken Marcus

Bob Harris said:

if we own v2017 is there an upgrade path?

Quicken 2018 opens 2017 files so no upgrade there.  If you're talking about a discount of some sort, you probably will get some sort of offer in email or in your 2017 product.

Quicken Jeff

bigevil said:

how does the dropbox backup work? 

See also:
https://www.quicken.com/support/getting-started-how-use-dropbox-quicken

Quicken Marcus

zwzlife said:

Canadian here. I can order and download QM2018 Deluxe (Bill Pay is not for Canadian after all) by using a fake USA zip code.
Installed, login with existing ID, open a QM2017 file. So far so good.
I changed my account's address back to Canadian address after got the confirm email.

Quicken for Mac works with Canadian banks just like 2017.  There will be a new Canadian subscription plan launched later.  

smayer97

zwzlife said:

Canadian here. I can order and download QM2018 Deluxe (Bill Pay is not for Canadian after all) by using a fake USA zip code.
Installed, login with existing ID, open a QM2017 file. So far so good.
I changed my account's address back to Canadian address after got the confirm email.

Just cross-linked this info to the Informal Survey of Connectivity Results with Financial Institutions (FIs)/Banks in Canada using Quicken for Mac

to capture a more recent data point here.

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

Quicken Marcus

Bobalaska said:

I am interested upgrading from Quicken 2015 to buying 2 year subscription to Quicken 2018 Deluxe
Mac. I understand I can only do this from retailer, not on Quicken
website.

Questions: 1. Is that correct?

2. Licensing: Quicken website
says that at least prior versions of Quicken can be installed on up to three computers in the same
household. So if I buy a 2 year subscription, install onto my
computer, and then want to install on a second computer- mainly for my
wife's Quicken account, does it work the same way- use my Quicken ID for installation on my computer to access my data file, and then use her ID on her computer, etc?  Is only difference the subscription vs former paid upgrade models?

This is correct.  One Quicken ID which is tied to your subscription used on multiple computers which supports lots of files.  In fact, if you have multiple ID's tied to different files you'll want to convert them all to your single subscription Quicken ID.  In 2018, your Quicken ID is tied to the application and not really to the file.  You can open a file with a different QUicken ID and theoretically view it but if you try to sync or download transactions you'll be asked to change the owner.  Changing the owner does mean you'll need to set up the account downloads again but this will be necessary to move everything under the subscription ID.

Quicken Marcus

Eric said:

Is there a way to have non-cleared transactions show as bold?

This hasn't changed but it's an interesting idea.

Quicken Marcus

smayer97 (QM2007, CDN user since '92) said:

@Quicken Marcus take a look at this one...
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/multi-currency-account-migrated-incorrectly-mac-...

Thanks.  So I guess we don't really support migrating a Quicken Windows file with transfers between accounts of different currencies.  The question still stands, would it be OK to break these transfers and to make them 2 separate transactions at least until we can add the architecture to do this correctly.  At least the balances wouldn't be wrong.  

RickO

brucel said:

Upgraded.  Overall the upgrade looks good, especially the improvements in the Investment area.  However, the new version blocks the main thread much (spinning rainbow cursor) much more than 2017 making it unbearable to use with my large data file.  These types of issues can easily be resolved if the development team would leverage Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) or NSOperationQueues to move the computationally intensive operations off the main UI thread to background threads.

Marcus,

It's been a pretty long running complaint that larger data files take quite a while to open (that is, until the main window populates). If there's anything that can be done to get the main window drawn more quickly, it would be a good improvement.

RickO

bigevil said:

how does the dropbox backup work? 

Marcus/Jeff... One question that isn't answered is: can the Quicken-provided Dropbox space be combined with the user's pre-existing Dropbox account and space allocation?

RickO

Eric said:

Is there a way to have non-cleared transactions show as bold?

I would vote "NO" (unless it's a preference option). We already have the very prominent empty box in the Car field and we have the uncleared filter. Bold text would impact the alignment both vertically and horizontally and I would not find it desirable.

brucel

brucel said:

Upgraded.  Overall the upgrade looks good, especially the improvements in the Investment area.  However, the new version blocks the main thread much (spinning rainbow cursor) much more than 2017 making it unbearable to use with my large data file.  These types of issues can easily be resolved if the development team would leverage Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) or NSOperationQueues to move the computationally intensive operations off the main UI thread to background threads.

@Marcus, it is definitely a significant regression and much worse than Quicken 2017.  For example, if I click on Investments in the side bar, I see a beach ball for at least ~15 seconds for 1 year of data.  Apple's Instruments (see image below) clearly shows that all the work is being done on the main UI thread when I click on Investments (blocking the UI thread causes an unsatisfactory user experience). A better user experience and best practice is to push the computationally intensive tasks to a background thread and present a progress spinner or some sort of user feedback until it completes but blocking the main UI thread so the user sees a beach ball is not an acceptable solution.  While it is purported that this code hasn't changed, perhaps the new reporting framework is being invoked and processed on the main UI thread without allowing the event loop to process UI events.  These measurements are on my iMac 27" Retina with a quad-core 4GHz Core i7 processor with an internal SSD (much more horsepower than Quicken should require to run smoothly). I'm happy to take this discussion offline if it will help to resolve the core issue.


The Instruments view below is a zoom of the processing period above that shows that computing the investment information for presentation not only runs on the main UI thread but that it also doesn't leverage the 8 i7 CPUs available.  At a minimum, this computationally intensive work should be moved to a background thread to relieve the main thread UI event processing/responsiveness but if it can be dispatched to work queues for parallel processing across available CPUs, it would be much faster.

mistertheplague

brucel said:

Upgraded.  Overall the upgrade looks good, especially the improvements in the Investment area.  However, the new version blocks the main thread much (spinning rainbow cursor) much more than 2017 making it unbearable to use with my large data file.  These types of issues can easily be resolved if the development team would leverage Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) or NSOperationQueues to move the computationally intensive operations off the main UI thread to background threads.

FWIW, I perceive a very slight lag from QM17 when clicking on Investments sidebar -- like three or four seconds of beach ball rather than instantaneous. My file has ~8 years of investment data.

Specs:

QM18 Premier Version 5.2.0 (Build 52.20373.100); macOS 10.12.6; MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015); 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7; 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3; SSD; AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2048 MB Intel Iris Pro 1536 MB

Unknown

Zoolook said:

I've been waiting for multi-currency on the Mac version since before Essentials came out. It's the main reason I keep a VM on my Mac.

Will the migration from Quicken Windows to Quicken Mac maintain the transfers from USD to GBP accounts?

Please report your tests about foreign currency transfers and conversions here, because I also had to return QM because it didn't handle foreign currency transactions.  This is a critical issue for me, and would like to know any problems related to this before I consider moving to QM.  Thanks.

Zoolook

Zoolook said:

I've been waiting for multi-currency on the Mac version since before Essentials came out. It's the main reason I keep a VM on my Mac.

Will the migration from Quicken Windows to Quicken Mac maintain the transfers from USD to GBP accounts?

It doesn't - I tried it. I raised the issue in a different thread. It transfers $1,000 as £1,000 to the recipient account so my GBP account's balance is completely wrong with hundreds of transactions incorrect.

Zoolook

brucel said:

Upgraded.  Overall the upgrade looks good, especially the improvements in the Investment area.  However, the new version blocks the main thread much (spinning rainbow cursor) much more than 2017 making it unbearable to use with my large data file.  These types of issues can easily be resolved if the development team would leverage Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) or NSOperationQueues to move the computationally intensive operations off the main UI thread to background threads.

I have 12 years of investments across 4 accounts and it takes 2 - 3 seconds to render with no beachball. I'm on a 4th gen i7 MacBook Pro (mid-2014) so nothing special. macOS 10.12.6

Unknown

Zoolook said:

I've been waiting for multi-currency on the Mac version since before Essentials came out. It's the main reason I keep a VM on my Mac.

Will the migration from Quicken Windows to Quicken Mac maintain the transfers from USD to GBP accounts?

Zoolook:  Thanks for the heads up.  It ́s really frustrating.  What is very surprising is that such a huge bug went unnoticed by the Quicken engineering team.  It shows that Quality Control and testing is quite poor.

DrGForce

ozarkcanoer said:

Is Amazon's 2-year subscription with benefits (slightly lower per-year price and 15GB of Dropbox) really only available on CD/DVD?  I haven't owned a optical drive in years.

In addition to the better price, Staples also offers an electronic download, whereas it seems like Amazon and Office Depot are only selling boxed copies. I got mine at Staples.-- NORMAL --

DrGForce

ozarkcanoer said:

Is Amazon's 2-year subscription with benefits (slightly lower per-year price and 15GB of Dropbox) really only available on CD/DVD?  I haven't owned a optical drive in years.

In addition to the better price, Staples also offers and electronic download, whereas it seems like Amazon and Office Depot are only selling boxed copies. I got mine at Staples. -- NORMAL --

DrGForce

In Quicken Mac 2018 Premier, I'm looking at the "All Transactions" view. In the upper right-hand corner of the window, it's now showing "Today's Balance" where in Quicken Mac 2017, it used to show Total Net Worth. Is this a bug or the intended function? If intended, it's not clear to me what this "Today's Balance" is showing? To me, Total Net Worth is a more intuitive number to show in the All Transactions view. -- NORMAL --

Zoolook

smayer97 (QM2007, CDN user since '92) said:

@Quicken Marcus take a look at this one...
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/multi-currency-account-migrated-incorrectly-mac-...

I would prefer this to the current way - I won't be using the Mac Quicken as my primary until I can migrate the balances correctly. I have mortgage and regular accounts in another currency so it's critical the balances are correct.

As an aside, I love the fact we can download Windows and Mac Quicken based one purchase (or subscription more accurately).

RickO

brucel said:

Upgraded.  Overall the upgrade looks good, especially the improvements in the Investment area.  However, the new version blocks the main thread much (spinning rainbow cursor) much more than 2017 making it unbearable to use with my large data file.  These types of issues can easily be resolved if the development team would leverage Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) or NSOperationQueues to move the computationally intensive operations off the main UI thread to background threads.

Another report of slow portfolio processing:

https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/quicken-mac-2018-portfolio-issues?utm_source=not...

RickO

DrGForce said:

In Quicken Mac 2018 Premier, I'm looking at the "All Transactions" view. In the upper right-hand corner of the window, it's now showing "Today's Balance" where in Quicken Mac 2017, it used to show Total Net Worth. Is this a bug or the intended function? If intended, it's not clear to me what this "Today's Balance" is showing? To me, Total Net Worth is a more intuitive number to show in the All Transactions view. -- NORMAL --

I don't have QM2018 yet, so this is just a guess... what happens if you change the filter from All Accounts to, say, All Banking Accounts. Does that number change to reflect the total worth of just the Banking accounts? 

ozarkcanoer

ozarkcanoer said:

Is Amazon's 2-year subscription with benefits (slightly lower per-year price and 15GB of Dropbox) really only available on CD/DVD?  I haven't owned a optical drive in years.

Good information @Quicken Marcus .  The response from Amazon on why they don't have software download was this:

" I have checked and inquired and I'm sorry to inform you that quicken has only released a CD version of this software on Amazon.
Please note that we provide a platform to Quicken to give the customers on Amazon a great variety of software. As they are the content owners and as they have released only the physical version but not digital version of the Software on Amazon, we are unable to offer you a digital version of the Software. "

So does that mean that with Amazon's physical media there will also be a card activation code and URL?

Unknown

Hmmm. Quicken 2018 for Mac does not significantly improve reports?  Do we need to wait another year for such capabilities.  Or do you suggest we give up on the Mac and switch to the Windows version of Quicken????  Poor reporting capabilities remains a glaring omission in the Mac software.

ozarkcanoer

Sorry if this is a repeat question. How long with Quicken 2017 Mac continue to fully function (including downloads from financial institutions)?

RickO

ozarkcanoer said:

Is Amazon's 2-year subscription with benefits (slightly lower per-year price and 15GB of Dropbox) really only available on CD/DVD?  I haven't owned a optical drive in years.

Marcus has clearly said that if you purchase the CD boxed copy, you will not need a CD drive to install it. There are download instructions and an activation code in the box.

RickO

ozarkcanoer said:

Sorry if this is a repeat question. How long with Quicken 2017 Mac continue to fully function (including downloads from financial institutions)?

See this:

Discontinuation Policy

Unknown

So far, so good using Premier; I really like some of the improvements. Since you asked for bugs I have a trivial one... In the portfolio view of investment accounts, there is the ability to sort securities by whichever columns you have shown. The issue is, when sorting by anything other than the name, it sorts the "Total" line with it, which more often than not puts it somewhere in the middle. 

So if you were to sort by symbol for example, it ends up like this:

ABC $100
TOTAL $175
XYZ $75

Certainly a minor issue, but annoying enough that I thought I'd let you know!  

Mike_jMGS

jive turkey said:

So far, so good using Premier; I really like some of the improvements. Since you asked for bugs I have a trivial one... In the portfolio view of investment accounts, there is the ability to sort securities by whichever columns you have shown. The issue is, when sorting by anything other than the name, it sorts the "Total" line with it, which more often than not puts it somewhere in the middle. 

So if you were to sort by symbol for example, it ends up like this:

ABC $100
TOTAL $175
XYZ $75

Certainly a minor issue, but annoying enough that I thought I'd let you know!  

Sloppy and embarrassing,

RickO

I just opened Quicken 2018 and it updated to 5.2.1 without offering the ability to delay the update. 

I find this completely objectionable!!! I want control over when and if I apply any updates to my software.