For Quicken Mac 2018, any update/workaround on exporting Investment data?

Najmi
Najmi Member ✭✭
edited March 2018 in Investing (Mac)
Hi,
I am running Quicken Mac 2018. I understand there is no investment data reporting/data export capability and we lost the copy/paste workaround that was there in Quicken Mac 2017. Wondering if anyone has uncovered any other workaround? I need a listing of the securities (ticker symbol) within my accounts and their current market value exported out to excel. I did call into support and got the recommendation of dropping down to Mac 2017. I may need to do that, but wanted to check if some other creative option exists. Thanks!

Comments

  • RickO
    RickO SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited February 2018
    No, there is not a workaround replacement yet. The Mac product manager is aware of the need to export portfolios and hopefully this will have a pretty high priority for inclusion in an update soon. I can't say when that might be though.

    I don't think you're going to have much luck dropping down to QM17. First, QM17 will not read your QM18 data file directly. You could try to export to QXF and import that to QM17, but in my experience, the investment data will not come over correctly.

    There is one last hope. That is, take a screenshot of the portfolio screen (several screenshots if it all doesn't fit on one page). Then run that through some OCR software and from there to Excel. You can search the web for free and paid OCR software for Mac.

    Just for grins, I tried one free one: PDF OCR X Community Edition. It worked pretty well, but really wasn't accurate enough. I also tried with a copy of PDFpen that I own. That actually worked pretty well. I had to use Excel's Text to Columns tool and use the $ delimiter to get the data into columns. Once I did that, it all added up correctly.

    I noticed that there are a couple free OCR tools in the Mac App Store with pretty good reviews, so maybe worth a try at those.
    Quicken Mac Subscription; Quicken Mac user since the early 90s
  • Najmi
    Najmi Member ✭✭
    edited February 2018
    Thanks, Rick. You also answered my next question - how successful will exporting out to QXF and reading back into QM17 be. Sounds like that may not be the best way to go.

    Will try your screenshot/OCR suggestion. 

    Should have looked at QM18 more carefully, checked in this forum, etc., before jumping in. Oh well...
    Thanks again.
  • RickO
    RickO SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited February 2018
    Najmi said:

    Thanks, Rick. You also answered my next question - how successful will exporting out to QXF and reading back into QM17 be. Sounds like that may not be the best way to go.

    Will try your screenshot/OCR suggestion. 

    Should have looked at QM18 more carefully, checked in this forum, etc., before jumping in. Oh well...
    Thanks again.

    I tried the QFX export from QM18, import QM17 just now and the value of investments after the import wasn't anywhere close to the before values. I didn't dig deeper to find out why.

    I'm hoping that they at least restore the old workaround pretty quickly. I guess the OCR method is all we have in the mean time.

    One hint on the OCR method... remove as many columns from view as you can (those you don't need). Then expand the column widths so there's sufficient white space between them. I don't know that you'll be able to find any OCR software that does a good job of detecting columns and inserting tab (or other) column delimiters. That's pretty easy to fix in Excel by using the Text to Table tool and $ as the delimiter for dollar columns. But for other columns, it's going to be tough separating them.
    Quicken Mac Subscription; Quicken Mac user since the early 90s
  • Najmi
    Najmi Member ✭✭
    edited February 2018
    Najmi said:

    Thanks, Rick. You also answered my next question - how successful will exporting out to QXF and reading back into QM17 be. Sounds like that may not be the best way to go.

    Will try your screenshot/OCR suggestion. 

    Should have looked at QM18 more carefully, checked in this forum, etc., before jumping in. Oh well...
    Thanks again.

    Yes, that is exactly what I did! I took a snapshot of just the ticker symbols and the current value. Tried a few OCR options (online and apps) and the one that just worked pretty well was https://online2pdf.com/   Apparently Google Docs can also do OCR. Will try it and report back on how that works...
  • RickO
    RickO SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited February 2018
    Najmi said:

    Thanks, Rick. You also answered my next question - how successful will exporting out to QXF and reading back into QM17 be. Sounds like that may not be the best way to go.

    Will try your screenshot/OCR suggestion. 

    Should have looked at QM18 more carefully, checked in this forum, etc., before jumping in. Oh well...
    Thanks again.

    I did a quick test with google docs and it was a mess.
    Quicken Mac Subscription; Quicken Mac user since the early 90s
  • Najmi
    Najmi Member ✭✭
    edited February 2018
    Najmi said:

    Thanks, Rick. You also answered my next question - how successful will exporting out to QXF and reading back into QM17 be. Sounds like that may not be the best way to go.

    Will try your screenshot/OCR suggestion. 

    Should have looked at QM18 more carefully, checked in this forum, etc., before jumping in. Oh well...
    Thanks again.

    Google Docs also works. Upload to Google Drive and then open in Google Docs. It converts to text. At least in my test conversion, it put each row element in one line - it did not preserve the column format. Not a big deal to edit and align the value with the ticker, in my limited case, but could be a problem with a file with more columns. Then download as txt and import in excel with $ delimiter. 

    Thanks for the OCR suggestion! It does work and will hopefully keep us going until  Quicken resolves this.
  • Najmi
    Najmi Member ✭✭
    edited February 2018
    Najmi said:

    Thanks, Rick. You also answered my next question - how successful will exporting out to QXF and reading back into QM17 be. Sounds like that may not be the best way to go.

    Will try your screenshot/OCR suggestion. 

    Should have looked at QM18 more carefully, checked in this forum, etc., before jumping in. Oh well...
    Thanks again.

    Yes - the one line per data element issue could make a file with multiple columns problematic...
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