Quicken Quotes Server on the Fritz?

dboltson

My Mac desktop product is unable to connect to the quotes server, in order to download the latest stock / fund prices. Instead, after choosing "Update Security Prices . . . " I see the Online Update Status pop-up box flicker "Connecting to the Quotes Server" a half-dozen times, and then, after about 3 seconds, just give up, and close.

Hope this latest glitch is quickly resolved!

MontanaKarl

@dboltson - Thanks for clarifying your use, which helps in understanding why you're still running such an old and unsupported version of Quicken.

Your evaluation of QMac in 2017 was not surprisingly a let-down.  Keep in mind that with Quicken's subscription model, they not only continuously release bug-fixes, but feature upgrades.  New features are no longer an annual thing, but come throughout the year.   As a very long time QWin user (under Parallels Desktop on my Mac for the past 13 years - actual Windows machine prior to that) - I finally could move one trust to QMac last year when QMac got the ability to distinguish tax exempt from taxable income for fixed income securities held in an investment account.

But, QMac still has no useful investment reports at all.  And, while QWin has a few - it does not have the types of reports you mention (I wish it did).  For your one example (change/drop since Feb 12 high), you would have to generate a report for Feb 12, export to Excel, a report for today, export to Excel - and then do the forumulas yourself for gross loss / % loss etc.  No actual comparison report built-in.

QMac's limited investing reporting as of today / version 6.1.1 are strangely not like any other reports in the product.  The only way to get a report listing individual securities or basis lots is from the investment account Portfolio view and clicking on the print button.  Unlike "real" reports, under the Report tab, this does not display a report on-screen that you can then drill down in or export to Excel.  It just gives you a print preview... so you can save as PDF or actually print.  Limited usefulness, and quite strange to not behave like a normal report - no filtering, no ability to see entire holdings across investment accounts, no ability to see performance based on any of the stored historical quotes... only the most recent quote.  It's quite odd and limited.

QMac 6.1.1's report for realized capital gains is the Tax Schedule report, filtered to display only capital gains.  It's almost acceptable...except instead of displaying the security name, the report displays either the ticker symbol or the CUSIP (for fixed income securities that have no ticker).  Seeing a report with a list of CUSIPs is pretty useless. There is no option, as in QWin, to choose which data to display in this or other reports - so it is what it is.

So... given your needs, I can't recommend either the current QMac or QWin.  I don't know of a better product for investors... but even if I did, I couldn't recommend it here without getting censored by a moderator.

Taz Xen

Also a Quicken Mac 2007 user here. Have not been interested in any of the new Quicken Mac versions since (too simplified), and especially with the subscription model, so I will be moving on to other systems.

I saw in this thread: https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7863709/quotes-have-stopped-downloading-for-q-mac-2007 that someone suggested manually or programmatically creating QIF files for import.

I have another solution that works for now.

If you look at the connection logs ("CONNLOG.TXT") stored within the Quicken qdfm file, you can see something like:

20210309 08:22:36: QFN: Beginning get from http://qw2007.quicken.com/desktop/qw2007/quotes/?stk.0=AAPL
20210309 08:22:36: ***QFN kQFFInished: returns 1560

(I have omitted additional query parameters from the URL for brevity)

So Quicken is trying to get quotes from qw2007.quicken.com, and if try to visit that page or use a utility like ping, you can see it no longer exists.

But quicken has other subdomains! qw.quicken.com resolves; what happens if we modify the query above? http://qw.quicken.com/desktop/qw2007/quotes/?stk.0=AAPL

It works!

How can we make Quicken get quotes from this other server?

Modify your /etc/hosts file.

qw.quicken.com resolves to 209.234.234.183, so add the following to your /etc/hosts file:
209.234.225.183 qw2007.quicken.com

Now restart the computer, and click the Quotes download button in Quicken. Up to date prices!

Here are instructions on editing the hosts file:
https://www.imore.com/how-edit-your-macs-hosts-file-and-why-you-would-want#how-to-edit-the-hosts-file

MontanaKarl

No problems getting quote updates in QMac Premier version 6.1.1, the current release version.  I've updated multiple times in a row, watched quotes change, and had no issues.

QMac Version 6.1.1 does not have any menu/button called "Update Security Prices..." and it does not have an online update status pop-up ... so I have to wonder if you might be running an old version of QMac 2007?

dboltson

Yes, Karl: QMac 2007 -- Tried and true, never surpassed. All I can say is that it was working yesterday!

jlgg

Same for me. Quotes download successfully in 6.1.1 but fail in Quicken 2007.

I hope they have not decided to drop access to quote downloads in 2007. There are still enough features in 2007 that are missing from 6.1.1 for me to continue to run both programs.

dboltson

I've got a workaround: to download quotes from Morningstar, and turn them into a QIF file, for import into Quicken 2007 . . . . but it ain't pretty!

Had to do this in November 2019, the last time they pulled this $%^$.
Fortunately, it only lasted a few weeks.
Hope they resolve this sooner, this time around.

Or come up with a viable equivalent to Mac 2007!
(But been waiting on that for more than a decade)

jacobs

I'm surprised to hear quotes had been working recently in Quicken 2007; I thought the plug had been pulled on that awhile back.

You understand that Quicken 2007 is completely unsupported at this point, right? I mean, it's fine to use so long as it works for you, but calling something with online services a "glitch" you hope they "resolve sooner" is misunderstanding the situation. Quicken isn't "pulling this $%^$"; the company flat-out doesn't support Quicken 2007 in any way any more. The quotes service in the supported versions of Quicken cost the company money to provide, so they have no commitment to maintain a service for people who haven't paid for the past 13+ years. If the quotes worked until recently, consider yourself lucky that you got that long out of it, but don't necessarily expect it to return. If it somehow does come back, count your blessings and know you're living on borrowed time.

As for Quicken 2007 versus current Quicken Mac, there's certainly plenty to discuss about what the new version does worse, what it does better, and what it doesn't do at all. For most Quicken Mac users, the current version is a viable replacement for Quicken 2007, but for some, there are still some sticking points which make it not suitable. You clearly identify in the latter group, but I don't know what your showstopper issue(s) is (are) with Quicken Mac. I'm in the former group; although there are certainly some features from Quicken 2007 I hope to see added to Quicken Mac over time, Quicken Mac now meets my needs reasonably well.  

dboltson

I use Quicken Mac 2007 to monitor a VHNW portfolio [well into 7 figures] with a little over 100 equity holdings (Stocks, Mutual Funds, ETFs) divided into several customized sub-accounts (Brokerage Domestic, Brokerage Foreign, IRA, Roth, Inherited Stocks, etc.) as well as over 20 bank / credit union accounts, holding savings & CDs.

I certainly have the means to pay for something better than Quicken. And have been searching for years, since at least 2019 (the first server quotes debacle) for a functional replacement, but I've yet to come up with an alternative that handles tracking of performance as elegantly and seamlessly as QMac 2007, including the generation of custom reports on the fly, not only for net worth, but investment return, and tax-related summaries by account, and by month, year -- as well as across a stretch of years, for comparison's sake. Not to mention equity returns from a specific date, as I just did tonight, seeing how much my portfolio dropped since the Feb 12th peak, both in aggregate, and in individual holdings.

With great regret, I bought into the Mac "upgrade" [around 2017] and found it severely lacking, a poor substitute. And a waste of my money and time.

In effect, this program is not only the centerpiece of my one-man "family office" but also facilitates executive decisions about buying / selling intuitively (based on charting), as well as via hard numbers, which are easily cross-referenced. (Even intraday, when necessary, in the case of stocks & ETFs.) It's a virtual one-stop shop.

But of course its reports are only as good as the data. GIGO -- Garbage In, Garbage Out. So without current quotes, I'm close to out of business.

Fortunately, I also have the wherewithal to generate end of day, close of business QIF files via Morningstar, finessed with a little sleight of hand. I just don't have the chops to program my own better, professional program.

2007 Mac was the standard bearer, by multiple accounts -- not just mine. Why it was put out to pasture [profit, of course] is a shameful tale. One which left so many of us abandoned. And so, as you say, I am well aware of living on "borrowed time." But I'm quite capable and willing to pay for the convenience of downloading quotes, if it comes to that. [Anything to make a buck, is that the overriding philosophy?]

And I'm also VERY open to suggestions of superior product replacements to explore -- Quicken brand, or not. (I tried the Windows version once, in desperation, also to great disappointment.)

So, in the interim, I've got my QIF generating tricks to fall back upon, should Intuit (or whoever is running the show these days) have permanently turned the Quote Server spigots off on us anachronistic curmudgeons. It's not that I'm cheap; I'd have happily upgraded years ago, were the replacement product not so transparently lacking, and inferior. (Not an upgrade at all, but a downgrade). I once also had high hopes for the "online" version breaking through, to save the day, but that seems not to have materialized in any meaningful way.

So all I can do is bide my time, until something more promising come along. And pray that customer loyalty and common sense prevail, and that we may once again have our day, and our way, through our say.

MontanaKarl

@dboltson - Thanks for clarifying your use, which helps in understanding why you're still running such an old and unsupported version of Quicken.

Your evaluation of QMac in 2017 was not surprisingly a let-down.  Keep in mind that with Quicken's subscription model, they not only continuously release bug-fixes, but feature upgrades.  New features are no longer an annual thing, but come throughout the year.   As a very long time QWin user (under Parallels Desktop on my Mac for the past 13 years - actual Windows machine prior to that) - I finally could move one trust to QMac last year when QMac got the ability to distinguish tax exempt from taxable income for fixed income securities held in an investment account.

But, QMac still has no useful investment reports at all.  And, while QWin has a few - it does not have the types of reports you mention (I wish it did).  For your one example (change/drop since Feb 12 high), you would have to generate a report for Feb 12, export to Excel, a report for today, export to Excel - and then do the forumulas yourself for gross loss / % loss etc.  No actual comparison report built-in.

QMac's limited investing reporting as of today / version 6.1.1 are strangely not like any other reports in the product.  The only way to get a report listing individual securities or basis lots is from the investment account Portfolio view and clicking on the print button.  Unlike "real" reports, under the Report tab, this does not display a report on-screen that you can then drill down in or export to Excel.  It just gives you a print preview... so you can save as PDF or actually print.  Limited usefulness, and quite strange to not behave like a normal report - no filtering, no ability to see entire holdings across investment accounts, no ability to see performance based on any of the stored historical quotes... only the most recent quote.  It's quite odd and limited.

QMac 6.1.1's report for realized capital gains is the Tax Schedule report, filtered to display only capital gains.  It's almost acceptable...except instead of displaying the security name, the report displays either the ticker symbol or the CUSIP (for fixed income securities that have no ticker).  Seeing a report with a list of CUSIPs is pretty useless. There is no option, as in QWin, to choose which data to display in this or other reports - so it is what it is.

So... given your needs, I can't recommend either the current QMac or QWin.  I don't know of a better product for investors... but even if I did, I couldn't recommend it here without getting censored by a moderator.

jacobs

2007 Mac was the standard bearer, by multiple accounts -- not just mine. Why it was put out to pasture [profit, of course] is a shameful tale.

I won't dispute that Quicken 2007 was the champ -- but I don't understand saying it was put out to pasture for profit. If Intuit had wanted to maximize profit, they could have pumped out several more updates to Quicken 2007. But they knew the technology it was built on was a dead-end, so they halted updating it it earlier than they needed to and didn't sell a Quicken 2008 or 2009. So that wasn't about maximizing profit. And their goal was to create an all-new version which was even more Mac-like, but they cut development before they had built a complete replacement product, which clearly wasn't a move to maximize profit, either.

The Intuit brain trust made the right decision to start over on a new Quicken Mac, but then botched it multiple times with their work on Quicken Financial Life (which never launched), the successor Quicken Essentials (which was severely under-powered), and then disbanding Mac development team. Nothing about their missteps drove profits! Even the eventual decision to resume development on what came to market as Quicken 2015 featured bare minimum spending for a handful of developers, and the significant limitations of that release diminished sales. 

In any case, there's no doubt that we're still nowhere where investors want the program to be. I'm hopeful about the trajectory of progress on Quicken Mac, although the pace of changes remains disappointingly slow.

Chris_QPW

For the record from what I heard the call to rewrite Quicken Mac came straight from the developers, and even though part of the reason was because that it was developed on old APIs that were going to go way (and actually did a couple of times) the main reason they wanted to do it is because the code had become unmaintainable.  As in they would change one thing and break two more things.

If you look at Quicken Windows you will see that it is basically in the same boat.  But unlike the (Edit it was 7.31% not 2%, but you get the point) market share program like what Quicken Mac was in 2007, neither Intuit or Quicken Inc can afford to rebuild it with no profits for what 10 to 15 years for the product that is the lion share of the money the company pulls in.

jacobs

@Chris_QPW  Yes, the developers of Quicken Mac back in the mid 2000's could see they were headed straight into a brick wall. For instance, Quicken 2007 is built completely around QuickDraw, the original graphics environment going back to the early days of the Mac -- and Apple was telling developers that QuickDraw was going to be removed from the program eventually as macOS had moved to Quartz for drawing to the screen. The database, the memory management, and other fundamental building blocks of Quicken 2007 just had no path forward. Add to that the complexity of the code built over two decades, as you note, and a complete re-write was the right (only?) decision. Now, I'm sure no one thought then that it would take more than 15 years to get back to where they were.

As for Quicken Windows, I believe it likely has similar problems of multiple decades of code using various technologies all cobbled together. While I have no knowledge to suggest it is happening, my hope would be that Quicken has some small secret team of developers working on a re-write of Quicken Windows in a long term project to develop a next-generation product with streamlined, modern code. (Apple did this when they moved to Intel hardware back in the early 2000's, in a project code-named Marklar which was originally the work of a single engineer working in secret; they had the Mac operating system running on Intel hardware for several years and through several operating system upgrades until company executives decided PowerPC chips couldn't keep up and decided to move the entire Mac platform to Intel.) In Quicken's case, unlike the slow building of Quicken Mac happening in public, for Quicken Windows they'd need to do the re-write in private, over several years -- and then one day announce a new update that was ready to go with most of the features of the current Quicken, so they wouldn't miss a beat in revenue.

Chris_QPW

jacobs said:

Now, I'm sure no one thought then that it would take more than 15 years to get back to where they were.

Yes this is a very common problem.  First of most users don't really realize that developer actually like to rewrite from scratch.  No one likes to maintains "other people's code", and they always feel "I could do so much better".  Not to mention it looks better on their resumes that they are working with the latest APIs and such.  And people way under estimate how complex a program like Quicken gets after all these years of adding features.  What's more, what seems trivial to a developer or manager you will have a group of users that will raise hell if it is changed in any way.
So you combine that with users that have no idea about such things demanding that it should all be dumped and restarted because of the problems they see, and the tendency is to rewrite.  I might add that both Apple and Microsoft love change.  They advertise such changes as "modern", "much improved", ...  even if it is the same old stuff in a different package.  It is ironic that some of the oldest code in Quicken Windows looks like some of the more modern because the look and feels have been cycled around again.

jacobs said:

As for Quicken Windows, I believe it likely has similar problems of multiple decades of code using various technologies all cobbled together. 

This is exactly the case.

jacobs said:

While I have no knowledge to suggest it is happening, my hope would be that Quicken has some small secret team of developers working on a re-write of Quicken Windows in a long term project to develop a next-generation product with streamlined, modern code.

I don't think so. I believe that Quicken Inc has already shown their strategy going forward.  It is called Quicken Simplifi.  And I think that this approach is a much better one than trying to rewrite a new Quicken Windows.

You wonder why Quicken Mac has taken so long, and changes come so slowly.  Most of that is the complexity, but Quicken Mac itself has something like 3 major rewrites (not of everything, but of critical infrastructure).  That isn't uncommon.  First off you have Apple moving the line.  Then anything that takes this long of time to develop actually faces the exact same problems the old Quicken Mac and Quicken Windows does.  You lose developers, and get new ones.  No one can understand it all and different developers have different skill levels.  You make mistakes (linked transfers anyone?).  Requirements change...   In fact there is no chance that Quicken Mac is a "complete rewrite".  It is subject to the same forces that put the original Quicken Mac and Quicken Windows in this position.

And when you top that off with the requirement that "it do everything the old one did, but better" then your customers come in with the belief that anything that doesn't work like the old version is "wrong".

By starting another program (Simplifi) and you instantly can say "Yes I know Quicken has XXX feature, but we have found that our users want YYY first."  What's more Quicken's average user age has to be something like over 40.  The younger generation want "online", not "Desktop".  So I believe that their strategy is to just keep building features on to Simplifi and hope that is where they will make their money in the future.

jacobs

@Chris_QPW  I agree that they created Simplifi to try to appeal to a younger user base, many of whom want a completely cloud-based experience. They also stated at the time that they had no intention of moving away from the desktop-based Quicken products. (But what else would they say if they didn't want to drive users away?)

That said, your premise that Simplify is the future and that they will not undertake a re-write of Quicken Windows points to an end somewhere down the line for Quicken Windows; like Quicken Mac in the early 200's, there will come a point where they just can't keep patching Quicken to keep up with changes in Windows. Since Quicken Windows is likely still the company's biggest money-maker, I'm somewhat doubtful that they decided several years ago to stake the future of the company on Simplifi with no plan for a next-generation Quicken Windows. Time will tell!

I've enjoyed this discussion, but we have gone way, way far afield from the original topic of this thread -- apologies to @dboltson -- so I'm going to suggest we let our musings on the history of Quicken and prognostications for its future come to an end for now.

kohster

Count me as another Mac Quicken 2007 user who has been cut off from quotes. :(

fredericch

As of 3/4 (and now also 3/5) the quote download window just flashes, the bar repeatedly refreshes, and no quotes get downloaded. I hope this is not a permanent shut down, and only a temporary server glitch. I've never experienced this in the past, despite the comments I see here about it having happened before.

jacobs

Quicken warned 2007 users of final service shutdowns in 2019, after ending support in 2016, so the fact that quotes were still working for users until recently is a pleasant surprise. Whether this shutdown was intentional or an inadvertent byproduct of some other server or security upgrade, Quicken 2007 users shouldn't expect the company to put any effort into restoring this service. If it does come back, consider yourself lucky to have dodged another bullet. If not, recognize that it was a service that cost the company money to operate even though Quicken 2007 customers haven't generated a penny of revenue for nearly a decade. They managed to keep Quicken 2007 somewhat functional for far longer than anyone reasonably expected, for which we should be thankful, but we all knew the end's been coming for quite some time.

kohster

I agree completely that we've been on borrowed time. I'm just hoping to continue borrowing. :) Heck, I've even started prepping a Mojave VM in which to run apps like Quicken 2007 and other 32-bit or similarly orphaned applications.

dboltson

Is that your best mean-spirited answer?

If a superior (or even comparable) product were offered and available, there's no question that we would have upgraded long ago, if only to keep up with the evolving OS platforms. But it makes no sense to pay again, or pay more, for less!

In the interest of NOT alienating customers — past, and potentially futures ones, too — wouldn't it make more dollars (and cents) to charge 2007 Quicken Mac for use of the quotes server, to help offset their costs?

Costs which, I presume, per user, are not really exorbitant, given the ubiquity of quotes available -- for free -- from Yahoo, Comstock, Fidelity, Schwab (TD Ameritrade), Morningstar, Google et al, and on and on . . . all publicly available information!

Given that there is no viable alternative that comes close to the capabilities of their "deprecated" product, then -- If deliberate -- what is being done here by discontinuing stock feed, amounts to an insulting inconvenience. It is, simply, poor customer relations, without any justification.

Give us options . . . such as paying for the feed ourselves -- if not to them, then to another service. Typing in daily closes by hand is no fun! But if anyone is interested in pursuing import of a QIF file, with data downloaded and massaged from Morningstar, give me a shout.

HINT: The target format, at its most minimal, will be a text file, with a "QIF" extension, that begins something like this [from yesterday's import]:

!Type:Prices
BOREF,7.25,3/4/21
^
VNYUX,12.05,3/4/21
^
FPADX,13.16,3/4/21
^
FSRNX,14.75,3/4/21
^
FSELX,16.15,3/4/21
^

jacobs

dboltson said:

Is that your best mean-spirited answer?

My posts here haven't been mean-spirited, and I'm sorry you perceived it that way. 

I'm only trying to share what I believe to be reality, based on closely following Quicken for many years. You make a plausible argument for providing a paid quotes service, but I'm certain Quicken won't do that. It's just not the business they're in. And because of data security issues, it's not as simple as it might seem. They stopped supporting Quicken 2007 back in 2016 because they wanted to put 100% of their resources into continuing to improve the Quicken Mac product. They've successfully migrated a large percentage of Quicken 2007 users to the current Quicken Mac, and they aren't going to spend more time or money on making the old product continue to function. 

The remaining Quicken 2007 users today fall into three groups: (1) people who keep using it because it still works and fits their needs, and don't need/want to pay to move to the new version, (2) people on very old Macs which can't run any of the Mac operating systems form the past several years, and (3) people who keep using it because the new version lacks one or more key pieces of functionality they depend on. For that last group, they believe the best thing they can do is plow ahead trying to add functionality to Quicken Mac; they made the decision long ago not to peel off engineers to work on extending the life of an old product a small number of users continue to use.

You say you'd pay, but the number of people who would pay for security price downloads would be pretty small. They'd have to do extensive engineering work to build secure payment processing, current membership checking, and modern security around all that, in a product which uses programming tools no longer in use and unfamiliar to most of their current engineers. Yes, market quotes are public information; the value a product like Quicken provides comes from packaging it and integrating it -- and building and maintaining the infrastructure to do that is just not as easy to do as it might seem. (Which is why, as you note, there aren't obvious choices of other software products that do it all and do it better; there are any number of personal finance programs and online services which do budgeting well or do in portfolio tracking well, but it's not easy to be the jack-of-all-trades for all things personal finance.)

You call this an "insulting inconvenience", "without justification", and "poor customer relations", even though they've been telling us all this would happen years ago. Customer-wise, I imagine they feel more compelled to work on the features that people paying them $30-$60/year are asking for than serving a small group of former customers who are generating no revenue for them. It's simple business economics. Of course, their hope is that they can serve current customers, former customers and protective customers by continuing to improve Quicken Mac. Indeed, the enhancements over the past few years have made it suitable for more and more Quicken 2007 users to make the switch. Hopefully that will continue to be true over the next year or two.

I hope for your sake that the quotes service magically does come back on for Quicken 2007 users, so it can continue to serve users like yourself until such time as the modern Quicken Mac is a viable replacement. I just don't think it's likely the quotes will come back, but I'd be happy to be wrong and watch Quicken 2007 get another partial reprieve for people who still depend on it and truly can't move forward. 

Chris_QPW

I personally don't have a stake in this because I'm not on a Mac but the way I see it is to a company a customer is one that pays them money.  Over on the window side I've seen many posts that goes something like this I'm using Quicken 2000 I've been a loyal customer for 20 years why haven't you done x or y for me.

I hardly think that any company is really going to worry about that kind of customer.

And in fact I think it is a disservice to the paying customers to spend any time on making the old one limp along instead of putting in new features and such in the new Quicken Mac.

kohster

Well I've found it's not that hard to cobble together a little data download and manipulation to get at least closing stock prices formatted into a QIF file for import as a proof of concept. If I want to do it regularly though I'll need to figure out a way to automate it a little more. Good to know it works though.

Basically I found a bulk downloader script that grabs data from Yahoo Finance at http://finance.jasonstrimpel.com/bulk-stock-download/ . I'm sure there are others out there that will do things better or I could roll my own Python script with the Yahoo Finance libraries that are out there but again I just wanted to see if this would work. Only limitation with this method is that it looks like Yahoo Finance doesn't have same day quotes for Vanguard mutual funds, or at least not at this time of the day.

Anyway, downloaded an Excel version of the data, did a copy and then paste-transpose to convert the rows into columns, quick search/replace in a text editor to convert tabs to commas, add the "!Type:Prices" first line and "^" last time, save as a .qif file, import into Quicken 2007, and hey I've got prices.

dboltson

Proof of concept -- Yay, the floodgates are open!
Now you're ready to streamline . . .

My approach is to first export a prefab "watchlist" portfolio from Morningstar.
I usually wait until after 7 pm, when prices have (usually) been updated.
Unfortunately a few of them (like QQQ) are not actually market closes, but after hours pricing. [I've found M* to be sloppy, and inconsistent, but better than nothing, for the most part]

Morningstar's cvs file opens into Excel in columnar format, so there's no transposition necessary. I arrange the columns I need (ticker & price) and then create a third column that I fill with today's date.

Then I copy all three data columns, whole hog, to a Text Editor, which adds "tabs" between each entry. Then copy that over to Word, where I do a series of Search & Replace (all),
converting those tabs [^t] into commas, and the last part of the date "/21" into "/21^p^^" [i.e., followed by a paragraph return, and then a (single) caret].

A bit cumbersome, but works like a charm. To create the export file, I copy the massaged data from Word back into Text Wrangler (my text editor); precede it by the header [!Type:Prices]; save it as filename. QIF; and I'm good to go -- ready to import.

Kinda fun, once you get the hang of it, though not sure how/if it might be better streamlined, or automated. But it's certainly easier than typing in 100+ NAVs!

Chris_QPW

I take it that Quicken Mac 2007 didn't get the CSV import for security quotes that the Windows side got.  That does make it more of a pain because you have to convert to QIF, but I just wanted to let you guys know that both Excel and Google Sheet have functions in them to get quotes.

Here is me checking out the function in Excel (getting the help video up is the main thing).

Lynn73

I'm with all of you who have not been able to fine anything as good or better than what 2007 does for us. Yes, I remember this happened sometime before and I felt like someone died, but then a few weeks later the security quote updates were resurrected and I truly rejoiced! Fingers crossed for all of us.

jtmay1

I am another who has lost quotes for Quicken Mac 2007 as of 3/3. I am praying that they do come back on. Does Quicken have any explanation for this? I pay for the current Quicken but have been using the old Mac version because I cannot get my data into the new version! I may have to ditch the whole thing and go elsewhere - there are alternatives you know.

jacobs

I don't know if there will be any official response from Quicken, and if so, it would likely just be a reminder that Quicken 2007 is a discontinued product for which they offer no further support or service. 

@jtmay1  I don't know what problems you ran into trying to import your Quicken 2007 data into the current Quicken Mac (I don't see any prior posts from you on this site), but you might want to create a separate, new thread here about what you've run into to see if there's any help anyone can offer in getting you to convert.

DanaJ

> @Chris_QPW said:
> I take it that Quicken Mac 2007 didn't get the CSV import for security quotes that the Windows side got.  That does make it more of a pain because you have to convert to QIF, but I just wanted to let you guys know that both Excel and Google Sheet have functions in them to get quotes.
>

Apple’s Numbers also has functions to get stock quotes (STOCK, STOCKH). I’ll bet QIF creation could be automated!

kohster

Hah. Well the Numbers function definitely makes this easy. :) Thanks for that and to the earlier poster about the Excel function!

allenvt

Count me in loving and now missing my Q2007 stock tracking ability. And YES jacobs, we get that it is no longer supported and that they want us to lump it and go away, but really.....?
I am now paying for Premier and would pay something- as many of us would- for this line of code to be re-opened.

jacobs

@allenvt  If the quotes cutoff right now is something inadvertent, perhaps it will just as suddenly pop back on at some point. If not, I explained above why I'm sure they will not create a paid service for quotes in Quicken 2007, as much as you and some others might be happy with such a solution.

The most effective thing I think Quicken 2007 users can do right now is to articulate, vote, and lobby Quicken for the key functionality that is missing from the current Quicken Mac which prevents you from taking that jump. I know you might prefer to focus on getting Quicken 2007 to continue to run awhile longer, but Quicken isn't going to take affirmative action to make that happen. So although it can't help you right now, the best path forward is to get Quicken Mac to become a suitable successor. Create new message threads (or add to existing ones) to explain "I can't migrate from Quicken 2007 because current Quicken Mac is missing ____". Don't generalize; nothing makes a programmer or product manager roll their eyes faster after 5, 6, 7 years of working to build Quicken Mac than someone saying "just make it work like Quicken 2007!" Stick to one point per thread; a list with 13 bullet points becomes a mishmash of ideas that doesn't become actionable and goes nowhere. Explain why you want a feature, or how you use it in Quicken 2007.

I've seen plenty of instances over the 6+ years of Quicken Mac where the squeaky wheel does get the grease. Sometimes that's a lot of votes for a topic on this forum; sometimes it's a well-timed and -placed comment in a new release thread that catches the product manager's eye. Lobbying for features can and does work (albeit not as quickly as anyone would wish).

Chris_QPW

I'm going to take a different tack on this thread.  Whereas I think that @jacobs' suggestion is the best if you really need a "Quicken in your future", I will point out what has happened for "some people" on the Quicken Windows side.

It is no surprise that over time features have been added to Quicken Windows that a lot of users have no need for, especially since they are "online services" (which BTW don't usually work 100% of the time).  Especially for the people that are doing manual entry.

As a result they don't want to use the newer versions (especially when the hear the word subscription).

So they stay with the older version, in some cases even versions before 2000.
Doing so has risks.  As their machines die and they can't run the old operating systems, and their version doesn't work right on the newer one, the have to look to update.  As time goes one this is "more uncertain" that they can find all the versions they will need to get upgraded to the most recent.  I think people that had Quicken 2006 Mac and below and wanted to update to the new Quicken Mac can understand what headaches this can cause.

But there are certainly people that fall into this category.  Of these I will break them down into three categories.  Pure manual entry, these folks download nothing and as such as long as the operating system doesn't cut them off, they a fine.  The manual entry people, but import security prices.  Quicken Windows allows importing security prices by CSV, so it isn't very hard to get the prices in the right format and import them.  And the last category is people that get their transactions in some form, and if need be change to QIF so that they can be imported (working around a restriction in the GUI that blocked importing into non asset/loan accounts).

Now it seems that Quicken Mac doesn't have the CSV security import, but as people have pointed out you can import them using QIF files (the same is true on the Windows side).  So this all very "doable".

So if people want to take these risks and stay with Quicken Mac 2007 they should step up and get a "community project" that solves the problem for everyone.  This is a much better approach hoping that Quicken Mac will do something for them, when in fact it isn't in their best interest to do so.

Now I don't have a Mac so I can't be the one that provides such a solution.  But I would be willing to put it on my website if that is a problem for people.
http://www.quicknperlwiz.com/

BTW @jacobs I'm going to put in one more "off topic" statement about Quicken Windows.  I think that the Windows group can in fact work with the patchwork that is Quicken Windows for an extremely long time.  About the only thing that would prevent it is if Windows dropped 32-bit applications since its is clear that Quicken is built on a database that isn't supported any more and is 32-bit.  But a good portion of Windows is still 32-bit so it is highly unlikely that they will drop 32-bit compatibility in the for seeable future.  And the developers definitely seem to be going full steam at adding features to Quicken Windows (not necessarily that great of features, but features/fixe none the less).  So in reality my prediction of Simplifi being the future for the company was neglecting the very real possibility of the Desktop version limping along.