How can I print a report with a collapsed category?

Kiwi1

I created a report with some collapsed categories (e.g., Personal). When I go to print the report, however, all items in the category show up for printing, resulting in very lengthy reports. Is this a bug in the Mac version?

Quicken Harold

Hello Kiwi1. Appreciate your question.

This does appear to be a bug in the Quicken for Mac software, as I have seen the same result when I closed the column headers in a report and requested printing of the report. 

What we would recommend is to report this finding to Quicken by Reporting a Problem (Help > Report a Problem.)

By doing this, this will send the screen shot and the details of the issue in which you report to us for review.

Thank you in advance, and appreciate you bring this to our attention.
~ Quicken Harold.

Kiwi1

I hope you can resolve this "Quickly", Quicken. I am working on my taxes.

jacobs

@Kiwi1, I'm just a fellow user posting this, but you should know that it is 99.9% certain that this will not be fixed in the week between now and April 15. Once they identify a bug, they need to schedule it to be worked on, develop the fix, test it, and release it -- a process which typically takes weeks or months.

If you really need a report without all the details, you could consider exporting it to a CSV file, and then opening it in Numbers or Excel and manually working to clean it up. Otherwise, just live with the longer-than-desired reports for now, and hope that this will be fixed before the next time you need it.

Kiwi1

Thank you, Jacobs. Appreciate being apprised of the time-line. Frankly, Quicken was much better when handled by Intuit. It now seems rather amateurish.

jacobs

@Kiwi1 I'd respectfully disagree. I'm only a Mac user of Quicken over several decades, so I can't comment on the windows side, but on the Mac side of things, things have only gotten better since Intuit made the decision to divest itself of Quicken -- even though they're not where most of us would like them to be, ey.

The reason the Mac program is in the incomplete state we find it in today is due to complete mismanagement under Intuit. I won't bore you with the detailed history, but here it is in a nutshell: Intuit management started work on a replacement for the legacy Quicken Mac product back in 2006, created a product that failed to make it out of beta testing, replaced the senior management team to be led by the guy who created Mint, brought out the vastly underpowered Quicken Essentials for Mac in 2010, promised a full Quicken Deluxe for the following year, then that management team was disbanded and development of Quicken Mac stopped, then they hired a new product manager in 2012 with only a handful (if that) of developers to resurrect building Quicken Mac. The modern Quicken Mac came to market in fall 2014, and while it was a major step forward from Quicken Essentials, it still lacked many features from the legacy Quicken 2007 or Quicken Windows. Once Intuit decided to spin off Quicken and a new management team was put in place, they invested in Quicken Mac by hiring more engineers, switched to a year-round development/testing/release approach, and slowly began chipping away at the features deficit in Quicken Mac. If you compare the current Quicken 2019 to the original Quicken 2015, you'd see a lot of progress has been made. But there's still a lot more to do, and it will likely take a couple more years to add much of the functionality that users are waiting for.

As for bug fixes, with the exception of major bugs in new releases, they have never been something that gets fixed in just a few days.

Kiwi1

Just started using Quicken for Mac last year, previously used it with Windows. Right from the start when it switched from Intuit (Windows platform), I did not like the appearance of the register, less information visible, and what was visible was not as distinct. It is more cumbersome to put in memos, and automatically assigns categories that overwrite my existing categories. Just not happy with it. Now this glitch with printing reports.

jacobs

@Kiwi1 For what it's worth, the entire Quicken Mac interface was developed when Quicken was still part of Intuit, so you can't blame the post-breakup Quicken company for that!

Out of curiosity, why are you finding it cumbersome to put in Memos? I find that pretty much equal to the old two-line register in the legacy Quicken Mac, which I'm guessing is pretty similar to Quicken Windows. Do you have the Memo field visible and in the best column position in each of your registers?

Assignment of categories is definitely somewhat problematic right now. I think the developers broke something in one of the updates at the end of 2018 as they did under-the-hood work to prepare for more user control over categorization coming late this year. 

As for the apparent bug with consolidated categories, have you tried any different type of report in the meantime? For instance, if you just want the category totals and none of the transaction detail, do New Report. click on Summary instead of Transaction, select Rows = Category, Columns = time, Interval = None, and then set the date range to last year or whatever period you want. This will give you a report by category with none of the transaction detail. (If you want transaction detail in some categories and not others, well, that will have to wait for them to fix the bug.) 

Kiwi1

Thanks for the tip about the Memos. I was having to open up the Edit feature to put them in, but this helped the problem. I noticed that it seems possible to download my Quicken for Mac data into the Parallels/Windows/ version. Do you know if that would resolve the printing problem?

jacobs

@Kiwi1 I've been strictly a Mac user for decades, so I can't tell you about details of Quicken Windows other than it definitely has many differences, some large, some small, compared to the Mac version. If you have Parallels, you can certainly download the Windows version and give it a try to see if you'd be happier dealing with the virtual machine in order to use the more robust version of Quicken.

But... be aware that you really can't migrate from Mac to Windows. (You can, but investments don't migrate at all, and there are some other wrinkles.) You might have to chose whether to pick up from your old Windows data file, without all your transactions from the past year that you've been using Quicken Mac.