Merge legacy investment categories with underscores (e.g. _IntInc) to new built-in categories?

Question

I recently migrated my Quicken Classic for Windows data to Quicken Classic for Mac. Many of my transactions have the legacy investment income categories such as _IntInc and _DivInc. When I attempt to merge these legacy categories into the sub-categories of Investments using the "Merge Categories" button within the Categories window, I get an error message:

Cannot merge the selected categories. The “Investments:Dividend Income” category is used internally by Quicken and cannot be modified.

It appears that merging categories into the required categories is not possible? Is there a workaround?

kopp · Answer

… are many of those categories actually being used by your old investment transactions?

It looks like some were correctly converted, but over 860 transactions still have the special underscore categories.

jacobs · Answer

I converted from  the old Quicken Mac product, not Quicken Windows, and had a similar issue with old investment categories. (In Quicken Mac 2007, they began with • rather than the underscore used by Quicken Windows.) But here's the question: are many of those categories actually being used by your old investment transactions? In my case, the import of my old data properly converted my old investment transactions to Quicken Mac's format of investment transactions, which don't utilize any expressed category. So a reinvested dividend transaction, which would have used category "•Div Income" in old Quicken Mac 2007 is now an investment transaction of Type=Rwinvest Dividend, which uses no category. In other words, most of my old investment categories showed in the Category window as "Unused" and could thus be deleted; there was no need to merge them. Perhaps the Windows conversion worked differently.

MontanaKarl · Answer

Unfortunately not and no workaround that I know of.  When I converted from Win to Mac, I had the same question and was (and am) irritated that the "Investment" categories on QMac are locked in a way that they can only be used in Investment Accounts and cannot have other transactions merged into them as you've found.  Word is that this is "by design" but it makes zero sense to me - as with QWin we had total freedom to use any category anywhere and no harm arose from doing that.

I just finally had to accept that my first year of conversion reports would look like cr*p and could not properly total investment transactions… and that any historical reports will always be cr*p also.   It's really inconceivable that they didn't allow QWin users to migrate the Windows investment categories to Mac ones; but that's where we are.