Investing->Portfolio: Sort by Symbol is not correct

cnewms

Quicken Classic for Mac Version 7.7.1 (Build 707.53346.100) macOS 12.7.5

Sort by Symbol has a bug. Attaching a screenshot. AAPL should be at the top.

jacobs

@cnewms This is an odd issue that a few of us dug into a while back. It turns out it's a macOS setting; it's not anything to do with Quicken Mac. (You can verify this by opening another app, like Numbers, creating a list with AAPL, BB, and ZZ and sorting to find AAPL below ZZ.)

The issue is that "aa" sorts below "z" in Norwegian. And for some reason, one of the Apple updates changed the sort order for lists from American English to Norwegian. Seriously! Worse, they hid the key setting to fix this.

In older versions of macOS, like Monterey, the Language & Region dialog box had a menu for List Sort Order, and you could see it had been set to Norwegian Bokmal:

But in Sonoma, you go to Language & Region, and the List Sort Order menu is missing:

It turns out that if your Preferred Languages section at the top has only English, Quicken doesn't display the List Sort order. So you actually need to add Norwegian Bokmal to your Preferred Languages by clicking the + sign… and magically the List sort order field appears. Change it from Norwegian Bokmal to Universal:

(After changing the List Sort Order, you can remove Norsk Bokmal from the Preferred Languages list at the top.)

After changing the sort order to Universal, and re-launching Quicken Mac, you'll find that AAPL now sorts alphabetically as you'd expect it to.

Crazy, eh? 😀

Recap:

• This has happened to several Quicken Mac users, and since the odds of all of us inadvertently doing something to add Norwegian as a language seems extremely remote, I think Apple did something in some OS update which changed the obscure List Sort Order setting for some users.
• If the sort order on your Mac is fishy, go to Preferences/System Settings > Language & Region.
• If "List Sort Order" is visible (macOS Monterey and earlier), change it to "Universal".
• If "List Sort Order" is not visible (macOS Ventura), add a language like Norwegian at the top and the List Sort Order will appear. Change it to "Universal". You can then delete the language you added at the top.
• Quit and relaunch Quicken (and other apps with sorting issues, like Numbers) to verify that sorting is now as expected in English.

(The original thread tracing the journey to this discovery is here, for anyone who might want to see how we arrived at the crazy answer to this puzzling issue.)

cnewms

Just upgraded Quicken. Problem still exists.

Version 7.8.0 (Build 708.53876.100)

macOS 12.7.5

And yes, language & region are set to English (US) and United States.

psrovner

I'd wish to sort Securities in the same format as is used by my Investment Advisor in their monthly reports. How to do this?

Jon

@psrovner, Without knowing how your Investment Advisor sorts securities, it's impossible to tell you how to duplicate that. [Edited - Removed Personal Information]

cnewms

Still a bug. Tried everything I can think of. Perhaps there is something in the data file that is preventing the sort from working correctly. It is a download from e*trade. Really not worth troubleshooting any further. I'll just live with it. As a computer scientist though, sorting is usually a 101 level class 😀. Definitely something weird going on in the Quicken data though. I changed the symbol to X something, it found a company for it, saved it. Edited it again by typing AAPL and it couldn't find a company match. I had to type in "APPLE INC COM" and "AAPL". Saved it and the problem continues. I don't know what they're doing in that sort algorithm but something is definitely off.

jacobs

@cnewms This is an odd issue that a few of us dug into a while back. It turns out it's a macOS setting; it's not anything to do with Quicken Mac. (You can verify this by opening another app, like Numbers, creating a list with AAPL, BB, and ZZ and sorting to find AAPL below ZZ.)

The issue is that "aa" sorts below "z" in Norwegian. And for some reason, one of the Apple updates changed the sort order for lists from American English to Norwegian. Seriously! Worse, they hid the key setting to fix this.

In older versions of macOS, like Monterey, the Language & Region dialog box had a menu for List Sort Order, and you could see it had been set to Norwegian Bokmal:

But in Sonoma, you go to Language & Region, and the List Sort Order menu is missing:

It turns out that if your Preferred Languages section at the top has only English, Quicken doesn't display the List Sort order. So you actually need to add Norwegian Bokmal to your Preferred Languages by clicking the + sign… and magically the List sort order field appears. Change it from Norwegian Bokmal to Universal:

(After changing the List Sort Order, you can remove Norsk Bokmal from the Preferred Languages list at the top.)

After changing the sort order to Universal, and re-launching Quicken Mac, you'll find that AAPL now sorts alphabetically as you'd expect it to.

Crazy, eh? 😀

Recap:

• This has happened to several Quicken Mac users, and since the odds of all of us inadvertently doing something to add Norwegian as a language seems extremely remote, I think Apple did something in some OS update which changed the obscure List Sort Order setting for some users.
• If the sort order on your Mac is fishy, go to Preferences/System Settings > Language & Region.
• If "List Sort Order" is visible (macOS Monterey and earlier), change it to "Universal".
• If "List Sort Order" is not visible (macOS Ventura), add a language like Norwegian at the top and the List Sort Order will appear. Change it to "Universal". You can then delete the language you added at the top.
• Quit and relaunch Quicken (and other apps with sorting issues, like Numbers) to verify that sorting is now as expected in English.

(The original thread tracing the journey to this discovery is here, for anyone who might want to see how we arrived at the crazy answer to this puzzling issue.)

cnewms

@jacobs, Wow, what a find! That is nasty. And as a fellow software engineer I can appreciate how long that one must have taken to figure out. I wonder if there is a ticket filed with Apple on that or if they've fixed it in the latest OS. I'm still running Monterey because I'm a musician and I need Logic Pro to work flawlessly (they introduced a crash bug into Core Audio in the latest OS release), so I'm holding on to Monterey as long as possible. And that Universal sort order combo box does not appear in Monterey without adding the Norwegian language.

Thanks for the awesome reply. All fixed on my end.