Year End Copy for Mac

smayer97 said:

Now you have to make extra effort to work around this poor design, to either shrink it (but Quicken limits how small) and potentially lose access to some features, move it making it awkward because you cannot move different parts independently like you could prior to this "unified" design, or make mental note that there may be windows behind the main window; all of which makes it more cumbersome to navigate around, especially when you need to seem multiple windows open at the same time. /rant

It isn't necessary to do all these machinations to find open windows: there's a Window menu in Quicken Mac, and the bottom of that menu shows by name all the open report windows, account register windows, and support windows. So all that's needed is to know/remember to pull down the Window menu.

That said, I completely agree that having windows in Quicken Mac becoming hidden is poor interface design, and I believe the developers need to create a visual indicator of open windows because they may be hidden from view and adversely affecting performance. I often open several reports, and if I'm not thinking to check the Window menu, especially if I quit Quicken and come back sometime later, there's no proactive indication to the user about hidden windows. 

First, I prefer the design of the main window with the left left sidebar, and being able to jump from account to account within the main window, to the old Quicken 2007 interface, where everything was in its own window. (You could easily bury one window under another in that interface as well, and I spent a lot of time moving windows around in Quicken 2007 to see what I needed.) And in Quicken Mac, you can open every register, report, and budget in its own window, just like Quicken 2007 if you wish, and you can close the main window if you wish, making it Quicken 2007-like. You can also open all the lists (categories, securities, tax, payees, etc.) in separate windows. The problem is too many windows, and being too easy to hide some windows behind others.

That said, I am making an assumption that since the developers have just updated the overall design, and since they have made Quicken Mac more like the interface of Quicken Windows, the developers are not likely to now switch to an all-different design. Working from that assumption, then, is what leads me to say there needs to some other visual way of seeing one's open windows, particularly when relaunching the program with windows hidden out of sight. Perhaps some sort of small anchors/tabs on the top, bottom or right side of the main window (somewhat like some of the Adobe applications)? Perhaps an informational dialog on launch to tell you when you have open windows obscured by the main window? 

Anyway, we've drifted way away from the original topic of this post. Reports in windows behind the main window may be the source of the slowness @Punkin described, but the question was about making a year-end copy. So I wanted to note that I have close to 30 years of data in my file and do not experience slowness from the accumulated data. With the modern database in Quicken Mac, the program can handle much more data than the older databases in prior versions of Quicken.