Merge Categories Is Grayed Out For All Categories

jpreston

I have Quicken 6.0.3. It doesn't matter if the categories have data or not, top level or not. Under the same top level or not. I'm trying to clean up my cats.

jpreston

I found the problem. To make it easier to find the cats to merge I had a subcat as a subcat of the other. This is nice for grouping but it seems mergers have to be at the same level. Then it works.

jacobs

Are you Command-clicking on two or more categories to highlight them? That's what activates the Merge Categories button. (That is, Merge categories acts on the Categories which are highlighted; if no Category or just one Category is highlighted, but button will be gray.

Try this as a test. Create a new category Dog. Create another new category Cat. Click Cat. Command-click Dog, so they're now both highlighted. The Merge Categories button should be active. Click it. Select whether you want Dog or Cat to be the surviving category, and merge them.

If that works okay, the next question is whether you are sure you aren't including any of Quicken's "Required" categories in your selection of categories to merge? In your Categories window, are you seeing the Status column on the right side? If not, Control-click on any of the column headings, and you'll see a short pop-up menu. Check all the columns. Now that you can see which columns are Required, are you trying to merge with one of them? You can't, and Merge Categories will remain grayed out. 

jpreston

Selecting two or more sub categories that include data doesn't activate the merge option. These are categories that I created. I don't use Quicken's required cats. It looks like it would work with top level cats but I have none of those to merge. Is there a way to merge subcats? If I move them to top level and merge and then back to a subcat that could do scary things to the database.

jacobs

I wrote above how you can do a quick test by creating two categories, selecting them, and seeing if they will merge. Please try that.

you can merge subcategories that same way, but only sub-categories of the same category. You can't merge sub-categories from different main categories. If that's what you're trying to do, you must move the two current sub-categories together. You could: (a) move the sub-category of Category A into Category B, and then merge tow sub-categories of Category B; or (b) move the sub-category of Category A and the sub-category of Category B to both be main categories, and then merge them. To move a sub-category, just click and drag it to under the desired category, or click and drag it to above their current category if you want them to (temporarily) become a main category.

jpreston

I found the problem. To make it easier to find the cats to merge I had a subcat as a subcat of the other. This is nice for grouping but it seems mergers have to be at the same level. Then it works.

jpreston

Thank you for your help! This thread is the most comprehensive help I found in my search so hopefully others will be helped.

jpreston

Actually what I did was made sure they have the same names and drag the sub-subcat to their top level and it would merge. A bit faster, especially since they originally had the same names but one was in another top level cat. Thank you for the help! Over the years needs change and a cleanup was needed.