Shortcuts to attachments

Dave22

I successfully tried this today and I think it would be great if Quicken would make this behavior "official".

I created a shortcut to an Excel file and then dragged that shortcut to a transaction in the Quicken check register.  I saved the transaction. 

I then deleted the shortcut from my desktop and made a change to the Excel file. When I re-opened the file in Quicken, it displays the updated Excel file.+

I think that allowing transactions to be linked to documents via a shortcut would be a great improvement. It would reduce the size of the Quicken data file, it might eliminate duplications, it would allow supporting documents to be updated.

While this appears to have worked perfectly, it would be better if Quicken could link using a shortcut by default; or at least eliminate the need to create a shortcut manually, attach it and then delete it.

Thoughts?

splasher

That is a novel approach to attachments in Quicken, but it means that you could never move the location of the actual attachments, so if you had them on a USB drive, you would have to make sure that Windows always used the same drive letter for it, easily done, but something that you would need to do.

You get my vote.

Rocket J Squirrel

A while back, I suggested a similar idea. Instead of storing the entire attachment inside the QDF file, store the pathname only, perhaps as a file:// URL. I think that idea may have been lost in a previous incarnation of the Quicken forum.

It would be good to get the attachments out of the QDF for many reasons.

Dave22

I agree that it could be problematic moving the file from one folder to another but interestingly, I moved the target file from one folder to another and the shortcut still finds it. This appears to be a Windows behavior. 
I'd be less concerned with that if Quicken would display the file name/location that it's looking for. 

Ps56k2

Dave22 said:  ... I moved the target file from one folder to another and the shortcut still finds it.
This appears to be a Windows behavior. 

wow - just tried that on the same drive - and yeah, it works - not not sure across drive letters...

splasher

I tested this and after a reboot, Windows loses track of where it is and Quicken does nothing when you double-click on the attachment.

It immediately loses track if you move it to a network drive.