Inability to adjust investment register column widths and/or hide [edited] (15 Merged Votes)

Quicken Community

There are dozens and dozens of similar posts as ideas, questions, problems, etc. going back many years. WHY is the Quicken development team continuing to ignore this very real usability issue? I've been a PAID Quicken users continuously since 1991 and am fed up that this request is never addressed in version after version. Now we are on a subscription model and being promised that enhancements don't have to wait for yearly releases. PROVE IT. Fix this now - it's incredibly simple and endless users have requested it. I am using Quicken 2018 Premiere with all the latest updates. I'd like a reply from a Quicken employee please.

PutterFlutters

Investing Registers - The ability to configure "Investing" registers as can be done with a "Banking" register using "Register Columns..." menu selection would be greatly appreciated.

ColinGruchy

I agree.  When you click the holdings button on the Investment Register, you can adjust the columns there, so the capability exists.  I hate horizontal scrolling.  And Quicken employee, please get them to adjust the default width of each column to the contents of the register when you open it.  Should be an easy fix.

Unknown

If you are referring to that stupidly wide column called Description, it is used for several things - like X10-1100xx-1 Cash|[Fidelity USA - Cash].  If you look very carefully you can see that Description has quietly been split into 2 columns. (I use 2 row display).  I also tried deleting it, no go.  It also annoys me because all the stuff in Description is available elsewhere.

Jim_Harman

I'm not a Quicken employee, but in QWin 2018 Premier, when I am viewing the Transaction List (Register) for an Investment account, I can mouse over the little line between most of the columns and click and drag the double arrow to adjust the width. Do you see something different?

The Description column has a minimum width. I think this is because when the transaction is selected, multiple fields are shown there.

Unknown

ColinGruchy said:

I agree.  When you click the holdings button on the Investment Register, you can adjust the columns there, so the capability exists.  I hate horizontal scrolling.  And Quicken employee, please get them to adjust the default width of each column to the contents of the register when you open it.  Should be an easy fix.

Colin Gruchy you are actually talking about a different problem (which needs to be fixed too)

ColinGruchy

Jim Harman said:

I'm not a Quicken employee, but in QWin 2018 Premier, when I am viewing the Transaction List (Register) for an Investment account, I can mouse over the little line between most of the columns and click and drag the double arrow to adjust the width. Do you see something different?

The Description column has a minimum width. I think this is because when the transaction is selected, multiple fields are shown there.

All columns may be adjusted except for the Description column.

Unknown

Jim Harman said:

I'm not a Quicken employee, but in QWin 2018 Premier, when I am viewing the Transaction List (Register) for an Investment account, I can mouse over the little line between most of the columns and click and drag the double arrow to adjust the width. Do you see something different?

The Description column has a minimum width. I think this is because when the transaction is selected, multiple fields are shown there.

Yes, but.  I do not run Quicken in full screen mode AND I do not want to.  When I see that big wide space that I can't fix And when I know that it reserved for info I don't want, I am annoyed.  Further, when I do want that info I KNOW where to get it.  Sorry if I just seem grumpy

Unknown

Jim Harman said:

I'm not a Quicken employee, but in QWin 2018 Premier, when I am viewing the Transaction List (Register) for an Investment account, I can mouse over the little line between most of the columns and click and drag the double arrow to adjust the width. Do you see something different?

The Description column has a minimum width. I think this is because when the transaction is selected, multiple fields are shown there.

It can be adjusted (larger) the problem really is that you can't adjust it smaller than the minimum they have set, and it really is too large of a minimum.
And frankly looking at how they have set the minimums for all the columns it doesn't make much sense.  And also long ago there should have been support for removing columns and for the fonts to be adjusted just like in the non investment accounts.

But there is also the lack of understanding of all that is in that column.
As in even if you are using one line mode when you click on a transaction it is going to show all the information on two lines, and as such really needs the description column to be a certain width to show all they want.

But even so if information is cut off that should be the user's choice.

For instance looking at this it looks like the Description column is way to large.


But when I click on it:


It is still too large, but you can see that they are really making sure all three numbers show up.

But this doesn't line up with what they are doing for most of the other columns.


Most of the columns allow you to shrink them to the point that you almost can't see them.

I notice that the Description column is the only one that has multiple second line fields, so that might have something to do with what makes it more difficult to do.

But they should have been able to figure out something in all these years.

Unknown

Jim Harman said:

I'm not a Quicken employee, but in QWin 2018 Premier, when I am viewing the Transaction List (Register) for an Investment account, I can mouse over the little line between most of the columns and click and drag the double arrow to adjust the width. Do you see something different?

The Description column has a minimum width. I think this is because when the transaction is selected, multiple fields are shown there.

I feel that was a lazy decision on the part of the developers (who decided black and white was better than color). They could have made it possible to delete that column. The info is available elsewhere.  I would have been delighted with that choice

Unknown

ColinGruchy said:

I agree.  When you click the holdings button on the Investment Register, you can adjust the columns there, so the capability exists.  I hate horizontal scrolling.  And Quicken employee, please get them to adjust the default width of each column to the contents of the register when you open it.  Should be an easy fix.

BTW just for the record.  The Holding window columns not remembering what the user set has been a problem I have submitted in basically every beta for probably 10 years.  This is base 101 GUI design.  If you allow the user to set columns on a "long lived setup" you always remember that setup.

Or you don't have them change the columns and you ensure somehow that the sizes picked always show everything.

With the Holdings window you get neither!


When it first comes up as they set it.  Name column is way to large.
Then I set it to:


And if you close the holdings window and come back any column settings you do, are gone.

ColinGruchy

ColinGruchy said:

I agree.  When you click the holdings button on the Investment Register, you can adjust the columns there, so the capability exists.  I hate horizontal scrolling.  And Quicken employee, please get them to adjust the default width of each column to the contents of the register when you open it.  Should be an easy fix.

This is really frustrating for me.  I open this window at the end of each day to see the daily change for the account and each of the securities within it.  I maximize the window now to see it.  I never had this problem in H&B 2014.  When I upgraded this year to 2017 it became an issue.

Unknown

ColinGruchy said:

I agree.  When you click the holdings button on the Investment Register, you can adjust the columns there, so the capability exists.  I hate horizontal scrolling.  And Quicken employee, please get them to adjust the default width of each column to the contents of the register when you open it.  Should be an easy fix.

Personally I just use the Investment -> Portfolio view which allows full customizing and it actually remembers its settings!

Unknown

Thanks for chiming in everyone. How do we get the "new and improved and expanded" Quicken development team to acknowledge the problem? I understand the minimum width issue, but it has to be incredibly simple to just let us choose which columns to display and which not to. I'd also like to be able to reorder them (in all the other registers too). Plus there's the misaligned column heading glitch that any competent software developer would find embarrassing. So frustrating!

Unknown

I could not agree more how annoying this is.  The column width format also changes from desktop to laptop.  That this should be such an easy fix, means Quicken isn't keeping up to date with its customers.  It's not asking a lot to allow making columns smaller or hidden and maintaining widths when opening on different computer.

Unknown

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Is it possible to lock column titles in various investment accounts i.e. similar....

Mick

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled QWin: How can I change the columns of the investment transaction list?.


The transaction list starts of with the attachment column and Clr column. These are not highly used for financial transactions. Also I would rather start off with the name of the security than these two items. Why can't we move columns around and also select or de-select what we want?>

mshiggins

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Investment Columns.


Thanks for the suggestion.

Note: This conversation was created from a reply on: QWin: How can I change the columns of the investment transaction list?.

Unknown

I will join in with a slight variation on the above. I find that I CAN adjust acolumn widths for the first row (of my 2-row register display), and for Payee, that also changes the Memo and Category columns just below Payee (to each comprise 1/2 of the Payee column width. BUT my biggest concern (related to some of the above) is that I use my quicken file (in my Dropbox) on both a laptop and a desktop PC (Win 10). And without any clear logic, the column widths change between those two platforms  AND between all my accounts. So pretty much each time I change platforms and open quicken, i have to re-size columns for every account I want to work in. A royal pain. Must be possibloe for Quicken main data file to carry with it settings info that correspond to the Display settings of the computer Quicken opens in. Argh! This was never a problem before about 2-3 yrs ago, i think. Quicken's settings followed me fine back in the day.

cdanl38

One more voice lamenting the inability to reduce the width of the Description column (beyond the preset limit) in the Investment Transaction Register (Windows). 

Unknown

As others have said, I need to be able to hide columns I don't use and not be limited by a minimum size in any of the columns in the Investment Transaction Register (Windows). I see no reason why this isn't possible, nor why settings don't remain the same from one session to another.  Come on, Quicken - we'll know you're listening and responding by fixing this.  Grrrr ...

Unknown

I also would find it valuable to be able to resize the Description column in the investment register to a smaller size and to customize the order and presence/absence of columns. 

Meanwhile, to avoid horizontal scrolling, I find I can see all the columns if I go to the View menu and undock the Account Bar. Annoying extra clicks, but much easier than repeated horizontal scrolling.

UKR

Robert Wheeler said:

I also would find it valuable to be able to resize the Description column in the investment register to a smaller size and to customize the order and presence/absence of columns. 

Meanwhile, to avoid horizontal scrolling, I find I can see all the columns if I go to the View menu and undock the Account Bar. Annoying extra clicks, but much easier than repeated horizontal scrolling.

There's a one-click "show/hide the Account Bar": Click the triangle to the left of the word ACCOUNTS in the (green in my example) Tabs bar



You can also try pressing the F11 key to toggle a "full screen mode" on or off within the size of your Quicken window. Does not perform a Windows maximize screen function.

The Descprition column in the investment register can be resized, but only to a certain program-required minimum length.

Unknown

Robert Wheeler said:

I also would find it valuable to be able to resize the Description column in the investment register to a smaller size and to customize the order and presence/absence of columns. 

Meanwhile, to avoid horizontal scrolling, I find I can see all the columns if I go to the View menu and undock the Account Bar. Annoying extra clicks, but much easier than repeated horizontal scrolling.

Thanks for pointing out the show/hide triangle next to "Accounts" in the header. That does reduce the number of clicks required for my workaround while waiting for the excessively large minimum width of the description column to be addressed. 

leishirsute

In Checking account registers, I have the ability to customize what columns I want displayed.
In Investment accounts, I don't have that ability.
In Investment accounts, I can change the width of the securities field to 1 character displayed, but I can't do this in the Description field.  I often want to shrink the column width of the Description field in order to fit desired information on the screen, since I can't choose fields to display in Investment accounts.
Please make consistent column behavior throughout Quicken.  Preferably, make column tailoring behavior more closely match column tailoring behavior like that in check registers.

Suggestion

leishirsute

The description column in the investment register eats up too much screen space and can't be narrowed to less than 42 characters.  I often need to narrow a column to  see the other columns and the description column doesn't allow for that.  Please fix all columns widths to be able to be narrowed to 1 character or provide an investment register settings option to select the columns to be displayed.
I don't understand why there is a different GUI behavior between checking and investment registers regarding column selection and column widths.  Please fix Quicken to have consistent user-experience for all registers.

amhazell

It would be a wonderful improvement if any unwanted investment register column (e.g. the first 3) could be removed, and if any column's width could be adjusted!