How to choose which columns show in a report

Mark Carlson

I've created a report for my tax appointment, and there are columns of information that I don't need or want for this. If I ask only to show summaries, the information in the columns disappears, but the space for the columns does not, leaving a huge amount of blank space between the date and the amount. 

The columns have no headings, but the second one is bank/credit card (which I don't need or want to see), the second is category (which I do want to see), and the third is memos (which I might want to see. 

There is nothing under the "View" menu which gives any way to choose what I want to view. 

Two questions:
1. Is there any way I can control this?
2. If I choose only to see the summaries, is there a way to get rid of the huge blank space between the date and amount?

lhossus

I don't know a direct way to do what you want.

You did not say what report you are trying to generate, so I cannot make specific suggestions.

But many people have solved issues like this by exporting a report to csv, and then importing the csv into a spreadsheet. From there, make whatever edits and adjustments and generate the report.

Mark Carlson

Thank you much for your response. It's a report of all of my annual income and expenses by categories for 2018.

I had thought of exporting it as a CVS file into a spreadsheet, and I probably will, but it really seems as if that should not be necessary; Quicken ought to be able to do this better, and in fact, this is the first year of many of my using Quicken in which this has been a problem. They changed something that made it less usable, unfortunately.

jacobs

Mark, are you using "New Report" on the reports menu to generate your report? If not, try that. Reports generated from New Report allow you to select which columns to show or hide, what order to put them in, and set their relative width. The named reports which appear under "New Report" on the reports menu are the reports that carried over from the predecessor Quicken Essentials software, and use a pretty rudimentary reports engine. the developers have been trickling out more and more functionality to New Reports over the past two years, and at some point, they will retire the "old" reports.

Mark Carlson

Thanks, jacobs! I thought that I had generated this report from New Reports, but maybe I didn't and didn't realize what I was doing. In any case, I'm loathe to start from scratch, as I've just about finished preparing for my tax appointment tomorrow! Next year, though!

smayer97

jacobs said:
...at some point, they will retire the "old" reports.

I would double-check that... I recall Marcus making a more recent statement somewhere that they are thinking of updating them once they finish with the new reports, rather than removing them. I took me a bit by surprise, so it stuck with me.

jacobs

Some (think: Category Summary) don't make sense to update, because they're completely duplicated by the new reports. Others (think: Net Worth Over Time) might make more sense to retain, because they don't need some of the new features. Still, it would surprise me if they would decide to leave two completely different printing architectures in the program permanently.