Can I get a pie chart or bar graph alongside a custom summary report? (Q Mac) (7 Merged Votes)

jacobs

ndstreet said:

another vote for expanding graph options on reports

@ndstreet  You may have already done this, but make sure you actually vote and don't just say "another vote".

To vote, scroll to the top of the page, and under the first post in the thread, there's a yellow box with a vote counter; click the triangle under the vote counter to add your vote; the triangle will change from dark gray to light grey and the count will increment by one.

As for comments, it helps to add specific needs or expectations or, as the programmers like to say, use cases, for the features you're asking for. Especially one like this, which is very broad and could be implemented in many different ways. Specific use cases -- how or why you would utilize specific types of charts/graphs -- help the programmers better understand the scope of issues users are asking them to address.

pcd

I'm really surprised at the lack of basic charting/graphing available in quicken for mac. Being able to specify pie charts for spending by category feels like table stakes - particularly since there's a (non-customizable) version available on the home screen. Very disappointing.

KS Longtime User

Graphs are such a basic concept I find it amazing this feature was not there at launch!

jacobs

KS Longtime User said:

Graphs are such a basic concept I find it amazing this feature was not there at launch!

@KS Longtime User According to Quicken Mac users, there are more than 100 features which are so basic that they should have been included from the start!

The problem, of course, is that each of these takes time to program, and there are limited programers and hours in a day/week/month/year. So the developers take into account user feedback (like this forum, surveys, calls to their support center, etc.) and develop a prioritized road map of which projects to tackle over time. The more votes each Idea post receives, the more likely it is to move up on the developer's priority list.

TTSguy

GREAT idea!

ricgpdx

If it is going to be a while before we can create graphs again, this would be useful to add to the pre-fab charts that are available on the home screen.

scott2020

It is hard to understand how in 2021 there is a financial program that doesn't have a pie chart. "How much did I spend by category" is a good example where a list of alphabetized categories really is unhelpful. Sorting by amount is slightly better but comparing categories is so much faster in a visual format. In any event this thread is over a year old so any way to find out how far down on the list graphing is?

jacobs

scott2020 said:

In any event this thread is over a year old so any way to find out how far down on the list graphing is?

In a word, no. Quicken. never talks about which features will be arriving when. They probably don't want users going ballistic after a "promised" feature is delayed for any number of reasons. 

garysmith87

I'm a bit confused by the request here...and some of the divergent comments.

I agree that it would be really nice to visually view or print reports with the option to have pie charts or bar graphs.

However, in lieu of that there's a pretty simple solution.

Every Banking register (Cash, Checking, Credit Cards) has the tab option of Spending and Income alongside Transactions.  There, you can filter the transactions to a specific date range and the appropriate pie chart will always appear.

Thus, if I go to my checking account, select the Spending tab and filter to This Month, I get a pie chart with my expenses for the entire current month (first day to last).  There are multiple date filters along with custom dates.  And the filtered transactions appear below the chart.  

Additionally, since Quicken Mac has account groups and sub groups, you can also select all credit card accounts...or all checking account accounts...or for that matter, you can select all Banking accounts which will include ALL Cash Flow accounts.  I use this setting as my Start Page in Quicken Mac...and I can visually see my expense total and the category pie chart for my entire month.  

The income tab works similarly.  

Additionally, you can select a slice of the pie chart and the corresponding sub categories will show...and the transactions for those sub categories will show.  

And whereas the Quicken Mac print option won't let you print the pie chart, you CAN use Mac's Print
Screen option to print it.  Using the Screenshot app located in your Utilities folder is an easy way to print a full screen or a user select window.  

So, there are ways to accomplish what you probably need...unless I'm completely missing something.  

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jacobs

@“Kathryn Z” What graphs are you thinking of? There are a few graphs in Quicken Mac as described just above, but there are no graphs which have been removed over the past 7 years that modern Quicken Mac has existed.

Eric B

Graphs, please. Particularly for Cash Flow over time, and Income vs Expense over time. Graphs like these reveal trends visually in ways that scanning a giant matrix of numbers cannot.

AntonJazz

@garysmith87 said:
> So, there are ways to accomplish what you probably need...unless I'm completely missing something.  

The pie charts you mention cover a very small case, and it doesn't include my needs. I would like to be able to pick a Payee (an income or expense source) and see a graph of their transactions over time. For example - I'm an Apple developer and I get monthly payments from Apple. I'd like to see visually how they've changed over time. Very different from what you say exists.

dwhitnee

STOP SAYING NOTHING HAS BEEN REMOVED!!!! Functionality no longer exists that Quicken *2007* had and has not been in modern Quicken for SEVEN YEARS. Just basic line graphs of account value would be helpful. For example today I wanted to see how fast my checking was draining. There is no obvious way to do that if it's not a portfolio account. Do NOT tell me to export to excel to do this basic functionality that worked just fine FIFTEEN YEARS AGO.

Also the voting mechanism is ludicrous. If I had not seen the 47th comment here that told me what tiny triangle to click that only exists on the first post I would not have known I've been shouting into the void for the last year.

If Quicken 2007 still had "update prices" I'd still be using that. But no, I much prefer paying $50/year for less functionality.

jacobs

@dwhitnee Many of us loved and were happy with Quicken 2007. They didn't kill it to drive people to a newer, lesser program; Quicken 2007 died because it was deeply rooted in many technologies which Apple removed over time after the Mac operating system switched to being Unix based. They couldn't offer to maintain and upgrade Quicken 2007, or they would have. (Just look at Quicken Windows, which has continued updating the same code base for 30+ years.) Quicken 2007 was great for what it was, but it was completely tied to old technologies which couldn't be modernized. That's why they started over, from scratch. The new program started with very limited features, and over time, the developers are adding more and more features from Quicken 2007 (and Quicken Windows).

So it is technically correct say nothing has been removed from the current Quicken Mac, because the reality is that some features which existed in Quicken 2007 just haven't been built yet. Does Quicken Mac lack some features (like the one this thread is about) compared to its predecessor? Of course. But saying that a feature worked fine 15 years ago and should therefore work in today's program just isn't realistic, because each such feature needs to be built again from scratch.

And of course, we longtime users wish this process went faster, and we wish more of the missing features from Quicken 2007 had been created by now. But the reality is that there are hundreds of feature requests and the small development team can only work on a small number of them each month. Compared to, say, 5 years ago, Quicken Mac today has many more features and is a much better program. Over time, it's likely the developers will get around to implementing many of the missing and desired features, but with more than 500 Idea posts on this forum alone, it's easy to conclude that some ideas won't be addressed for years.

And because we all use Quicken differently, Quicken Mac users have differing views about which features are most important. For instance, to you, this is obviously a top priority, whereas to me, graphs aren't something I used much in Quicken 2007, and wouldn't be near the top of my wishlist. The developers have to sort through all the requests to prioritize which ones get developed sooner and which remain on a back burner longer. 

Finally, the voting on this site... I agree it's not clear or intuitive and could be much better. But this site runs on forum software that's from another company (Vanilla), and Quicken can only use the tools the software platform offers. While the vote totals on the site aren't huge, they do show some ideas which get hundreds of votes, some (like this one) which get a moderately large number of votes, and some which get a very small number of votes. The developers don't depend on vote totals alone in their prioritization, but the votes here do give them some indication of the relative interest in some features versus others. 

Bopper

Do we really have to explain why it would be helpful to be able to create graphs? Because it's a lot easier to get the big picture when we can see it! Can't believe I'm paying all this money with such a basic feature still missing!!!!

Micky

Okay I voted. But to be clear, as a software developer, if you are replacing a piece of software because of dated technology, dated look and feel, dated interfaces, the absolute baseline of where you start is, what functionality did the user have before. So when people say you "removed" it, and the comeback is, no, this is "new", that is splitting hairs, and missing the point. The user community, of which software development relies on as they are the customer, has an expectation of functionality. If there was a forum at Quicken that took usage reports of Quicken 2007 and saw that indeed, 1% of all users ever clicked on Graphs, so the decision was made to do away with them, that would be understandable. Although that 1% would be hopping mad. But as Q2007 for Mac was client based software, I'm not sure how much click data was available, if any at all. So when a user says it's missing, it is.

So, to make this comment about a question versus a statement, when can we, as the user community, expect the same type of graph capability that existed in Q2007, and possibly, hopefully, a better one? As one user mentioned, you are already doing it on several panes within the product, the investment one is one that comes to mind.

Here is my wish list:
Spend over time across an interval should be a line/bar chart, or have that capability.
Spending by category makes so much sense as a pie chart (how much of my month is spent on food).
The ability for any report, to have a button to make it a graph.
The most useful would be a complete graphing subcategory of reports that allowed you to pick the type of graph, point it at the data (amount, category, time) and just plot the graph.

Thank you!
Micky

Micky

Okay I voted. But to be clear, as a software developer, if you are replacing a piece of software because of dated technology, dated look and feel, dated interfaces, the absolute baseline of where you start is, what functionality did the user have before. So when people say you "removed" it, and the comeback is, no, this is "new", that is splitting hairs, and missing the point. The user community, of which software development relies on as they are the customer, has an expectation of functionality. If there was a forum at Quicken that took usage reports of Quicken 2007 and saw that indeed, 1% of all users ever clicked on Graphs, so the decision was made to do away with them, that would be understandable. Although that 1% would be hopping mad. But as Q2007 for Mac was client based software, I'm not sure how much click data was available, if any at all. So when a user says it's missing, it is.

So, to make this comment about a question versus a statement, when can we, as the user community, expect the same type of graph capability that existed in Q2007, and possibly, hopefully, a better one? As one user mentioned, you are already doing it on several panes within the product, the investment one is one that comes to mind.

Here is my wish list:
Spend over time across an interval should be a line/bar chart, or have that capability.
Spending by category makes so much sense as a pie chart (how much of my month is spent on food).
The ability for any report, to have a button to make it a graph.
The most useful would be a complete graphing subcategory of reports that allowed you to pick the type of graph, point it at the data (amount, category, time) and just plot the graph.

Thank you!
Micky

jacobs

@Micky Yes, to some extent "adding a feature" versus "restoring a former feature" is splitting hairs, but I think there's an important distinction to understand.

You wrote: "If you are replacing a piece of software because of dated technology, dated look and feel, dated interfaces, the absolute baseline of where you start is, what functionality did the user have before." The reality is that Quicken 2007 was the culmination of about two decades of programming work, so when they needed to start over from scratch, even with the blueprint of what they had done before, it was going to take a long time to program all the features and functionality using new tools, programming languages, frameworks, etc.

Let's gloss over the part of the history that former owner Intuit botched the transition with multiple mistakes, dead ends, stops and re-starts, and lost several years. Jump forward to about 2013. Once they set out to build out a complete new Quicken Mac, they hired a tiny programming team — literally a handful of people — to work on it. Quicken 2015 was the first release of the modern Quicken Mac, in August 2014. It was missing a lot of functionality. But the product manager for Quicken Mac said at the time that they decided to release what they had, and add to it and improve it incrementally over time. And that's what's been happening n the nearly eight years since then.

If they had decided not to release what you consider to be an incomplete implementation of Quicken Mac until it contained all the functionality users had in Quicken 2007, it would have taken many more years in the development lab, and by the time they finally released something many years later, the entire community of Quicken Mac 2007 users would have, by necessity, moved on to some alternative before a "complete" program could be released; quite simply, Quicken Mac would have died.

The current Quicken Mac programming team is larger than it was a decade ago, but I think it's still fairly small. And there are more than 500 features listed as Idea requests on this site alone — features users have said they want to see added to Quicken Mac. Well, Quicken simply don't have the resources to implement all those feature requests in any short period of time. They've been working on the current Quicken Mac for nearly a decade now, and while it's leaps and bounds better now than the first iteration of the new program in 2014, it still lacks features from Quicken 2007, Quicken Windows, and newer features users want. Month by month, year by year, the developers continue building the functionality of Quicken Mac, and some of those Idea requests flip to "implemented."

So it's important to understand that it was simply impossible — absent tens of millions of dollars to hire a much, much larger programming team — to re-create every feature of Quicken 2007 in a modern environment before it was released.

And that brings us to the obvious next issue: why has this issue been ignored thus far? Many other Quicken users are asking the same question about their top feature desire, and all these feature requests are basically pitted against each other for priority on the developers' road map. It's not just "add the features we once had in Quicken 2007 first", because some users would want graphs and some would want QuickMath and some would want Year End Copy and some would want investment reports and on and on. As I said, there are hundreds of such feature requests in front of the developers. 

I have no inside information from the meetings of the developers and product managers, but I know they constantly evaluate these many hundreds of feature requests and decide where to deploy the resources they have available. The voting on this site is just one of a number of metrics they use to gauge user interest in various features. This particular topic has, as of me writing this, 81 votes. For Ideas on this site, I'd guess that puts it in the upper quarter of feature requests — but definitely not at the top. And they don't just decide based on votes here; they take input from their customer support teams on areas of the program users struggle with, from occasional user surveys, from input from beta tester users, from company mandates fro compatibility with the windows and mobile products, and from their intuition about which features will make the biggest difference to the biggest number of users.

They also need to evaluate how long a particular feature will take to implement; are they better having a programmer spend 3 or 4 months on one big feature or on 10 smaller improvements? They evaluate which ideas involve the same areas of the program, to group them together so they aren't constantly going back to modify or re-write the same sections of code. They need to assign different members of their team who deal with different parts of the program (report printing versus investment transactions versus download connectivity) and different development skills (e.g. database experts versus coders versus user experience designers).

Throw all those factors into a single vat, and it's clearly not simple or straightforward about how they proceed, because they can't satisfy everyone at once. Some features and enhancements will be implemented next month, some later this year, still more next year, etc.  Would it be great if they could just magically make all the functionality from the old Quicken 2007 available in modern Quicken Mac? Sure. But it's just not possible. So they keep plugging away at the list of requests — and user input can help influence which ideas move up or down on their list. 

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Finally, you ask "when can we, as the user community, expect…", and the answer is that they won't say. Why? A number of reasons. If they say this feature or that feature is slated for 2025, some people might decide they should move to a different product rather than wait. But more practically, in many cases they just don't know.

First, it takes considerable time to evaluate each idea; spec out what changes are needed to the code, the database, the user interface; and to estimate how long it will take to implement, test, and refine. (For many years, I worked with a software company which developed a custom database program for my business, and I would send them lists of detailed feature requests and ask them to tell me how long each would take to implement so I could order my list of priorities. But just the task of assessing in detail how they would implement each feature and how long it would take was, itself, a time-consuming process. They would ask, "Do you want us to keep plugging away on implementing your top features, or slow down or stop to spend the dozens, or hundreds, of hours it would take to do detailed evaluations of all your requests?") I'm sure some of the feature requests from Quicken users have been investigated, and they know how long it would take to implement — but some feature requests from users exist only as board concepts because no one has taken the time to do the deep dive into how it would be implemented and how long that would take. 

And even once they have a time estimate for implementing a feature, things can and do change; they might think a feature request will take two weeks or two months, but the estimate often turns out to be wrong. A programmer might discover unexpected complexity in modifying a part of the program, or a change might be implemented and then found to have an unexpected adverse impact elsewhere. A key developer might get sick, or might leave for another job. Apple might unveil changes in macOS that require programmers to drop their projects to fix a compatibility problem with the new OS. A key financial institution might require Quicken to make changes to meet their new security protocols, which again pulls people off working on a new feature. So even if they think they know when certain new feature are coming, the reality is that things are fluid, and they don't want to upset users by pre-announcing a feature which may get pushed down the priority list and not get released until a month or many months later than originally expected.

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Sorry for the very long reply, but I hope this helps offer some context and explanation for, well, why things are the way they are.

Too long; didn't read? If you want this feature in Quicken Mac, just to the first page and add your vote for it. Votes for features aren't the be-all and end-all, but they do matter. And the comments can be used to add your views about how charts/graphs should be implemented in Quicken Mac. 

chilimac

Added my vote for report graphs on the Mac. Not interested in the history or the debate about this being a new feature vs old. I just want to graph my reports like I can on Windows. Period. Please. Thank You.

MrMartinD

another vote to actually have graph options in reports. Amazing that I have to export to excel. I just switched from Windows to MAC as the MAC application seems "cleaner" and faster.

73VJ6szA3aB5LGD

Using Quicken for Mac (Canada)
Yes, I would like bar or line charts available for spending categories, with the option to be able to construct the charts from a category of one's choice by simply clicking on the category desired. This feature would make a visual history of spending and/or income greatly comprehensable.
Can I suggest that this feature could be an add-on to the "Chart of Spending by Month for a Specific Period of Time", that by selecting a category from there the desired chart would appear on top of the 'Spending by Month' chart, so that one could easily prepare a series of reports by referring back to the 'main' chart for reference.
There is no doubt that visual information is more understandable.
I am only a recent user of your product (just over one year) but I have found it to be most helpful so far in following spending and income records, and so I thank you for your efforts.

73VJ6szA3aB5LGD

Moderator: Can you please change my username to MisterD

kkmpflyer

Seems the amount all of us pay in SUBSCRIPTION fees every year should be more than enough to hire programmers to provide some of the same BASIC features that we used in Quicken 2007 for years.....without paying annually. Why is this so hard?

jacobs

@kkmpflyer First, just look at what you want: for Quicken to hire a team of programmers to implement new features, without paying annually. What do you think keeps the company afloat and pays for those programers, if not the subscription fees? In the earlier eras of personal computing, the base of users was expanding, and early generations of programs were advancing with scores of new features, so new sales and upgrades were enough to pay the bills. Now that personal computers and software are mature industries, the universe of users doesn't grow a fast and the feature changes are smaller — and a lot of work goes into updating and re-writing old code to keep up with modern Mac hardware, the annually-changing Mac operating systems, and the very frequent changes in protocols and security features imposed by financial institutions.

As for this feature request, the issue is that users have asked the developers for a wide range of features and enhancements. I think there are more than 600 Idea posts on this site alone. Even if some of those are fringe or impractical requests, we have to acknowledge that we, collectively, still have several hundred features we want the developers to implement. And because we all use Quicken differently, we all have different priorities we wish the developers would implement next. Personally, I'm okay with tables of numbers, and I don't really wish for graphs very often, but I'd sure like to see investment and budget reports, improved mass editing/find & replace, and QuickMath from Quicken 2007. But you might have an entirely different set of priorities, with graphs at the top of your wishlist. And there's your answer to  "why is this so hard?" There are a huge number of feature requests, and whichever ones they implement will please some users and frustrate others hoping & waiting for something else. 

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Emanuel P

it is insane that we don't have usable graphs yet

Avi

It would be great to have the option to customize our reports and instead of looking just numbers, we could have them in graphs.

Quicken Anja

Hello @Avi,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your request.

Your idea has been merged into this already active Idea thread regarding the same request.

Thank you!

deholz

We've been "voting" for three years... is there a magic number of votes or amount of time to get feedback on whether Quicken will be addressing this request?