has anyone had trouble adding a subcategory? (Q Mac)

Question

In the category list I am trying to add a subcategory to deposits.  I click the + sign and click add new subcategory.  The box comes up with new category and if I type in the name it makes it a new category instead of putting it under the deposit list as a subcategory.  I have tried several times, it was working fine yesterday and today I can't add any subcategories.  Small problem but very annoying.  It makes me wonder what else is wrong.  I don't use Quicken for any online stuff, (and from the problems listed here I'm glad I don't) just a checking register. It is old 2017 but it should still work as a check 
 register.  Any suggestions other than updating? It sounds like it might be a thing that quicken for mac has to catch up to, maybe.  Thank you for your time

jacobs · Answer

@Deborah Edson  Sorry, no insult intended at all. The point I was making is that if the behavior changed overnight, and we know that the program hasn't been updated, then something has changed. Jon asked above if you had updated your macOS since yesterday? If not, and the program didn't change, there's something different in what you're doing or in your data file which has to be causing this. I'd note that I've never seen this particular problem come up in this forum before, so let's explore further…

I still have Quicken 2017 on one of my computers, and I tried to replicate what you've described, but I cannot; creating a new subcategory works exactly as expected for me.

You describe creating what sounds like many subcategories for a main category called Deposit. I'm not quite sure I can understand what you're aiming to do having many different subcategories for your deposits; are you trying to track many different types of income, or income from different sources? I only ask because it's possible you're trying to do something with categories which could be better handled with Payees or Tags. But we can come back to that later if you wish…

I'm wondering if there's some limit on the number of subcategories Quicken 2017 will create. I don't know why that would be, but if it worked fine for you yesterday, and it works in my limited testing, but it's not working for you now, I wonder if you've hit some unexpected limit. How many subcategories of this main category do you have? (I tried a test just now and got up to 12 subcategories with it still working as expected, but I didn't go further not knowing how many you had.)

Or, attacking it from a different angle, if you try to create a new subcategory of some different main category which currently has two or one or no subcategories, does that work as expected, or does it also fail to create a subcategory?

Three other quick random questions…
(1) What version of macOS are you running?
(2) Where is your Quicken data file located on your hard drive? Is it in Quicken's default location (in the User Library > Application Support folder) or somewhere else?
(3) When you click on the Deposit category and click the + icon and select "New Subcategory" from the mini-menu, when the new category pane opens, is the right panel for income and expense showing income and grayed out (e.g. is it picking up the income/expense from the main category)? (2) Where is 

Showing "new category" is the normal behavior when you click on "New category" or "New subcategory". I've never seen it come up with the Name field blank. That's the way it works for me, both in Quicken 2017 and in the current Quicken Mac. 

So that's good, right? If I have a category "Deposit" with a subcategory called "ABC", if I click on Deposit in the list, select New Subcategory, and type "ABC", I get a message that "an item with that name already exists" — which makes sense, and is what I'd want it to do.

Yup, I agree. But are you saying the issue is now resolved, and that the program is now working correctly? Or are you saying that if you click on "Deposit" in the list, select New Subcategory, and type "XYZ", it creates XYZ as a new main category instead of as a subcategory of Deposit?

If we can't get to the bottom of this strange behavior, I'd also ask if this is something you need to do with any frequency? For most users, setting up new categories or subcategories is a very occasional thing — so even if you created a few new main categories and then selected and dragged them all into the Deposit category, it would seems to be a minor inconvenience which would only take a few seconds of time on the infrequent occasions you need to do this. But again, I'm not sure why you're creating subcategories of a Deposit category, so perhaps that's why I'm not understanding if this would be a more significant issue for you going forward.

Jon · Answer

Seems to be working OK for me, but I'm using the current version rather than 2017.

You didn't happen to install Mac OS 12.6 since yesterday, did you?

Deborah Edson · Answer

Thank you for your help but telling me I must be doing something differently is a little insulting.  I just tried it again and the same thing happened. After I selected the subcategory a box came up and it said new category instead of being blank.  Only this time when I typed in the category it said it already existed, which is great but doesn't explain what happened and I know to create a new category and drag and drop it. So the problem isn't exactly fixed if I have to create a new category and then drag and drop it into the main category I want it to be a sub in.  I should be able to click on the plus sign and select new subcategory and have Quicken work correctly.