How to manage autofill for category drop down menu when making a transaction

ronroberts

When I used Q 2007 I had all my own categories which I created over time. Now that I have transferred all my old data to the recent subscription, all my created categories are mixed in with all the category suggestions that are part of the subscription app. and the drop down menu when making a transaction is populated with unwanted suggestions which I often can't tell apart from the ones that I created since they are similar, and have to look into past transactions to see what category I used before.

I tried going into "Window" > Categories and then deleting all unused categories but that didn't change the dropdown menu when making transactions.

How can I purge unwanted categories from the drop down menu so that they don't show up when entering a transaction?

Thanks!

jacobs

@ronroberts I'm puzzled by your statement that deleting categories did not change the dropdown menu for selecting categories when entering a transaction. Are you saying that if there is a category "Dog", and you delete that category, when you enter a transaction, you still see "Dog" on the Category menu? 

I just tested this myself and couldn't replicate what you're saying. I identified a category which came as one of Quicken's default categories which I have never used: "Home:HOA Dues". When I entered a transaction and pulled down the Category menu, I saw HOA Dues as a subcategory of Home. Then I deleted the HOA Dues sub-category. When I entered a transaction and pulled down the Category menu, I saw the Home category and its several sub-categories, but HOA Dues was gone — exactly as I'd expect.

I'm wondering if you are having trouble distinguishing between subcategories which may be identical under different categories. If yo don't have things set this way already, try going to Preferences > Register and setting the "Category appearance" setting to "long names":