Color Question

Donald E. Kaye

Quicken 2007 showed negative numbers in red. Is that possible with Quicken 2020? If not, then that would be an important upgrade. Color calls immediate attention to items that might need to be looked at.

jacobs

No. There is no option for selecting color in registers. If you use the single Amount column, positive numbers are shown in green and negative numbers are black. If you instead hide the Amount column and instead show the two columns for money in and out (e.g. Payment and Deposit in a checking account), you can generally easily spot if a value is in the wrong column. Red is used in the Balance column when the balance is negative (as it is in a credit card account).

Donald E. Kaye

Thank you, but that wasn't the question. The question related to the REPORTS; RED for negative numbers desired in the Reports.

jacobs

Donald E. Kaye said:

Thank you, but that wasn't the question. The question related to the REPORTS; RED for negative numbers desired in the Reports.

Donald, your original question does not mention reports. The response for reports is the same though: no, there is no way to change the color formatting of text in reports. 

There are a few old reports carried over from Quicken Essentials which have splashes of color and graphs. The modern reports engine does not include any graphs and does not print negative numbers in red. Why? We don't know. Maybe they felt it was more professional looking? I think there were also some complaints about the old reports using a lot of ink for people who have inkjet printers (although the complaint was all the blue shading in those reports, not negative numbers in red).

So at this time, there's no user control to change negative numbers to red. If that's important to you, you can export a report as a .csv file and open it in Excel or Numbers, where you can make negative values display in red quite easily. You can also create an Idea post in the Product Ideas area of this site to request this functionality be added. The more people who vote for idea posts, the more likely this is to reach the developers. 

Donald E. Kaye

Jacobs, thank you for the help. Could you give me a link to the Product ideas area? I'm still trying to learn about this site.

jacobs

@Donald E. Kaye  In the upper left navigation area of the site, if you click on Categories, you can see a list of main categories on the site. One of them is "Product Ideas - Quicken for Mac"; when you click on that, you'll see a list of sub-categories for ideas (feature requests). You'd probably want to post this request in the Reports topic. Once you navigate to that topic, click the blue "New Idea" button near the top of the page.

jacobs

@Donald E. Kaye  I see you posted this as an Idea request. Great. I know this has come up before in discussion on this forum, but I couldn't find an existing Idea thread directly requesting this change. Remember to vote for your own idea. (Stupidly, this forum software doesn't count the original poster as having voted for their own idea!)

Anyone else reading this with a similar wish, go to the Idea post and vote for it.

Donald E. Kaye

Jacobs, was unlikely as it may seem, I can't find out how to vote. There is no "vote" indicated.

UKR

To vote on Ideas locate the big blue box near the top of the Idea webpage (or page 1 for long discussions) and click the "Up" triangle under the voting count.

Wait a moment for the vote count to be registered and updated before you continue.
The little triangle changes from grey to black when you have registered your vote.
Adding extra comments helps, but does not automatically increment the vote count.

Every vote counts!

For additional information about idea posts please read  https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7849425/creating-and-voting-for-ideas-in-the-community#latest