We’re excited to be releasing Quicken for Mac 2018 v5.6 today. We continue working on refining the features we have instead of adding new features. There are 4 main areas of improvement 1) Performance, 2) Reports, 3) Investments 4) Bills & Income and some general fixes. If you find issues in this release, please post the issue as a new comment in this forum post. We'll be actively monitoring this post for issues.
PerformanceWe’ve been focused on performance improvements throughout the product.
First, we looked at launch times. Quicken would take a while to launch if you had a file with lots of historical investment data. You should see an improvement from 30% to 50%. As part of this, we will also start to just download quotes for the securities you hold and not every security you’ve ever held.
Second, we looked at investments. Again, if you have a lot of investment data, loading investments would take a long time as Quicken tried to create the chart. Most will see some improvement here but it’s still not where we would like it to be but it should be faster in loading and in switching to other portfolio views. If investments continue to be slow for you, we recommend hiding the chart by dragging up from the bottom of the chart to hide it.
ReportsOne of the major changes we did was to make a seemingly subtle change in the Customize Report dialog to have 2 basic options for Account, Category, Tag and Payee items. In 5.6, you will choose to include
any account, category, tag or payee or to
only include the ones you select. Before it was tough to know whether you were including all transactions under a specific area or just the selected ones if all of them were selected. We also made other improvements in reports like displaying the data range and filter settings in the new reports. Also, foreign characters and emoji should export properly now which was an issue someone brought up here in the 5.5.x forum post.
InvestmentsIn investments, the portfolio view can now be printed and exported. This was a big request here in the forums. If you decide to print, consider using scaling to fit everything on a page or use Excel to get it looking exactly like you want to print it. You can now expand and collapse all securities in the portfolio view and all of this is remembered between different sessions. The number of shares can display more than 3 decimal places and the Y-Axis always starts at zero. This was a request from our CEO.
Bills & IncomeWe also continue to improve the Bills & Income view. First off, you can now search for an eBill vs picking a payee first. This should simplify the process. You can add a payee from the Payee view and we made it easier to add Payees to the Bills & Income view by adding a column to the Payee List window.
General FixesFinally, we improved the way transaction downloads work. Previously, Direct Connect accounts would block you from doing anything else while they were downloading transactions. Now, this happens in the background.
Updates5/9 - Starting the rollout of 5.6.
5/9 - As we always do, stopped the rollout for tonight so we can assess how things are going in the morning and wait for the Care team to be available. Please post any issues you run into as a comment to this forum post.
5/18 - We're releasing 5.6.1 as a staged release. Here are the release notes:
- FIXED - Fixed a report customization issue where all payees including hidden payees would appear in a report if no payees were selected. In 5.6, this setting was converted to use the new Any Payee feature, but it inadvertently excluded hidden payees. We're fixing this in 5.6.1 so that hidden payees will be included by default. Please review the Include hidden payees checkbox to see if it is set properly for your reports. A big thanks to Najmi for their help in figuring out this issue.
- FIXED - Fixed a similar report customization issue for Accounts. Previously, if all accounts were selected then all accounts including hidden accounts were included. In 5.6, this setting was converted to use the new Any Account feature, but it did not include hidden accounts which meant the same report would have different results. In 5.6.1 when these reports are converted, they will include hidden accounts by default. Please review the Include accounts hidden in reports checkbox to see if it is set properly for your reports.
- FIXED - In 5.5, we mistakenly allowed one to assign a Quicken-reserved investment category to a transaction which shouldn't have been possible. In 5.6.x, these categories were hidden so they could no longer be selected but this also meant that any transaction that used one of these special categories became Uncategorized. In 5.6.1, we're improving this behavior so that if one of these categories was used, we'll automatically create a new, user-defined category with the same name, but these will now be under a new parent category called Investments (Custom). If the transaction was used in an investment account, we'll first try to convert it to use the corresponding "Action" such as Buy or Sell, etc.
- FIXED - Fixed a crash that could occur when clicking through menus while other windows were open such as the Account Status window.
- FIXED - Fixed a crash that could happen when customizing report settings.
- CHANGED - In 5.6, we changed the Y-Axis in the portfolio view chart to start at 0 to be more accurate to the actual account market fluctuations. However, a number of customers stated they liked the old design better because it was easy to see the changes in the account. We decided to go back to the previous design for now until we can make this a user-defined option in a future release.
5/21 - 5.6.1 is available for everyone. We don't anticipate rolling this back.
5/31 - I'm closing this thread down. If you are seeing issues in 5.6.x, please now go to our 5.6.2 forum post.
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/quicken-for-mac-2018-v5-6-2-released.
