Arbitrary register column order

emptor66

Using Quicken Classic / Windows starter edition.

I know this has been asked for since Quicken for DOS. I'm one of the people who asked for it then, and I'm asking again now. Yes, I know there are two options for column order, but neither of them is what I'm looking for.

As a Windows developer myself, I know this is almost trivial to implement. Unless maybe you rolled your own grid component and are stuck with legacy code no one remembers how to change.

Is there another plausible reason for not implementing this feature? All of the topics I can find simply rehash the two choices we have and don't address the real question.

Please leave this discussion open so others can weigh in instead of quickly closing it.

Chris_QPW

This isn't as trivial as you think. They aren't using a standard grid component. They can't, between the fact that there is a one line and two-line mode and some other things, this component is actually custom component made up of other components specialized for this one purpose. And speaking of the two-line mode just having that restricts where certain fields can be. In fact, in the rewrite of Quicken Mac they purposely didn't implement two-line mode (even though people have complained about it) so that they wouldn't have this kind of problem. And not surprisingly in Quicken Mac you can basically move the columns around as much as you want.

emptor66

So we could have arbitrarily ordered columns by using single-line registers? I'd vote for that.

Chris_QPW

It would mean giving up two-line mode, and your fellow users would never go for that.

It was hard enough for Quicken Mac developers to resist putting it in, but removing it?

That just isn't going to happen, your fellow Quicken users wouldn't allow it.

q_lurker

Without knowing the implementation details, I agree that dropping 2-line mode is not a win. Could they allow user defined column order in 1-line and fixed order in 2-line mode? I can believe they could or could not, but I can imagine the complexity is having two versions would be potentially bug-ridden and a no-go.

Again without knowing what I’m talking about—

stuck with legacy code no one remembers how to change

seems quite possible.

Chris_QPW

In some ways Quicken and Intuit before them have been "too responsive" to customer requests.

One of things that has sort of been lost to time is one of the reasons they rewrote Quicken Mac starting in 2007. The main one was that Apple was getting rid of some of the APIs they were using, but another one that the developers stated is because of all the different "specialized modes" in the register it was a section of code that was error prone. I have seen several Quicken Mac threads when the Quicken Mac Manager would respond to questions, and many times he basically stated that he wanted to stay away from anything that wasn't already built into their "grid component". That wasn't met with a lot of happy faces as you can imagine.

So, one of the main goals of that rewrite was to make it simpler. No two-line mode, no "blank entry" at the bottom/top of the register (they enter Command+N to enter a new transaction, this is something like what MS Money did too). And no Downloaded Transactions tab. Such processes like reviewing of downloaded transactions and even reconciling happens in the register.

Not even talking about the code problems in Quicken Windows which popup because they have both download modes, there is just the "explaining"/finding out what a given user is using before you can even start to talk about helping them.