Quirk in v7.2.0 in Reports

20202

Actually this might have been in earlier versions also.

I ask for a listing of all spending in the last 2 years. I search for one payee that I have many entries for. I get a long list of just that payee. I want to print this listing, and since I have the same payee on every line, I delete that payee's name column from my report.

BUT deleting that column, doesn't give me a listing of every payment on a line, but wipes out the entire report. The only way I can get that report is if I start over and keep the payee's on every line. Quicken seems to lose the ability to just print the entries, sans payee, because it keys on the payee. But why can't you just freeze that report so that I can print it?

Thanks!

RickO

When you say "I ask for a listing of all spending in the last 2 years.", that is not enough information to know exactly which report you are looking at in order try to reproduce the issue. Could you please list the exact steps you took to create the report, or alternatively post a screenshot of the top of the report (everything above and including the first transaction).

That said, in current QMac, there are a few ways to generate a report on all transactions in the last two years for a single payee without a payee column. Here's one:

1. Click Reports at the top
2. Click Transaction in the left column, then double click Transactions by Month
3. Click the Edit button and change the date range at the top
4. While still in the Edit pane, click the Payees tab
5. Click Include Only Transactions with Selected Payees
6. Click the Clear All button, then search for and checkmark your single payee; click OK
7. Click View > Columns to remove the Payee column if it's showing
8. Click Month at the top to change the time interval to None if desired
9. If you'd rather organize by Category, Tag or Account, click the Row popup a the top to change the organization

20202

RickO: Thanks for your reply.

Technically this isn't a report. This is a list of my checking account's spending. Then I searched for a vendor and then removed the columns that I didn't want. Then I pressed PRINT.

Yes, I know I could make a customized report. But I'm in the checking account's "Spending" window. I clicked on a pie chart's segment to find the Category that I wanted. I should be able to print out whatever I want from that window, just like a report. But for some reason it loses all data if you take out the payee column. It shouldn't.

Jon

If you look closely at the search window for registers, you'll note that it says "Search all visible columns". If the Payee column is not visible, you can't search for a Payee.

RickO

@20202 Jon is right on. If you are trying to do this by filtering a register, the column must be visible. Remove the column and your filter results in no hits. The program is behaving as designed.

If don't want to use an actual report, the only suggestion I have to shrink the width of the Payee column down to as narrow as possible and slide it over to the far right end.

Another option would be to, instead of printing, use menu File > Export > Register Transactions to CSV File. Open that file in Excel or Numbers and delete the Payee column, then print.

Finally, if you do want to use an actual report, a quick way to generate it is to right-click on a transaction in the register or the Spending screen, then select Report on "payee name". This will generate a transaction report by time with interval none. From there, you can remove the Payee column and change the timeframe from all dates to two years.

jacobs

@20202 The Search within a register is based on the Payee, so you need to have the Payee column present; when you delete the Payee column, the search becomes undefined. For what it's worth, this is nothing new in version 7.2; I just tried it in version 6.12 I have on an older Mac, and it behave the same as the current release.

That said, I was surprised to find that older versions of Quicken worked the way you want it to. I launched a copy of Quicken 2017 and found it works as you'd wish: you could do a search on a Payee, then remove the Payee column, and the search results wouldn't update so you could print them without the Payee column. I'm not sure when over the past five or so years that changed; I suspect a long time ago.

Two suggestions:

(1) In your Spending screen, before you Print, make the Payee column as narrow as you can. The printed report will not entirely match how narrow you make it on the screen, but it will make the Payee column narrower.

(2) Instead of doing this particular data mining via Search, do as @RickO suggested and generate a report for the Payee instead. I'd make only one suggested tweak to the process he described. Instead of initially selecting Transactions by Month, which builds a report subtotaling each month's spending for this Payee (Rick's post does mention how to get rid of that in Step 8), I'd create a custom report like this…

1. Click Reports at the top
2. Click New
3. Click Transaction Report
4. Select Row=Time
5. Select Time Interval=None
6. Click Continue to Customize
7. Set the the date range at the top
8. Click the Payees tab
9. Click Include Only Transactions with Selected Payees
10. Click the Clear All button
11. In the Search box of that pane, enter the Payee you're looking for and checkmark it
12. Click OK
13. Click View > Columns to remove the Payee column

It may seem like a lot of clicking around to get what you want, but after you've done it a few times, you'll find it takes only a few seconds. If you save this report as something like "Individual Payee Report", then any time you open it, you can click Edit, click the Payees tab, and select a different Payee, so you don't have to build a new custom report every time you want one.

20202

Thanks all for your help! I knew I could do a report, but I was in a window that I was researching, and just wanted to print it on one page vertically, and the best way was to remove all the redundant data: Payees.

Something for a future update . . .

jacobs

I knew I could do a report, but I was in a window that I was researching, and just wanted to print it on one page vertically, and the best way was to remove all the redundant data: Payees.

I don't know if they will ever change the behavior to let you search on data in a field, delete that field from the screen, and have the data remain unchanged. Search is dynamically updated: if you change anything, like a date range, the Search term, or adding a column, the Search will be re-executed to find any matches in the new column. So it stands to reason that if you eliminate a column, the Search will re-execute and naturally will not find the Payee you originally found.

In the meantime… try shrinking the Payee field to its minimum width, select Print and click the box to print 1 page wide. I think that's the closest you can come to what you want without either (a) generating a report as discussed above, or (b) exporting the search results register to a CSV file, opening in a spreadsheet, removing the Payee column, and printing the spreadsheet.

smayer97

Actually, there is an IDEA request that addresses this very issue> Add your vote here:

Add Option to Search Invisible and Visible Fields

20202

"I don't know if they will ever change the behavior to let you search on data in a field, delete that field from the screen, and have the data remain unchanged."

Not to drag this out, but change that "delete" word above to "hide." I really see no difference between hiding a column in a report and hiding a column here. The behavior when unchecking a viewable field in a search doesn't have to eliminate a search term, or eliminate a column, just hide the column when you uncheck the visibility of said column. Same as in a report. When you generate a report, and hide a column, the report is not re-calculated, you just hid the column.

jacobs

@20202 As @smayer97 noted, there is a feature request to allow Search to penetrate hidden (non-visible) columns. That's not the way it works now but obviously anything can be accomplished in programming. 😀 I suggest you add your vote and comments in the thread linked above, which serves as the official request to the developers for this functionality.