Report Colors (Q Mac)

@Paul Galley

To answer your question first: we never know what is on Quicken's development roadmap. There are literally hundreds of user requests for feature enhancements, and which ones rise to the top is known only to the developers.

In my observations over the past 6+ years since the modern Quicken Mac was released, the developers mostly  focus on substantive things which can't be done with the program over aesthetic improvements like these. So if I were to guess, changes like these would be low on their priority list. Unless… (1) a lot of users were clamoring for the change or (b) it turns out to be an easy change to make while they're working in the same section of the program's code on other things.

A site moderator has merged your post into an "Idea" post requesting report customization options; Idea posts have a yellow box for you and others to enter votes in favor of the suggestion. Ideas which garner more votes are more likely to get in front of the developers, so be sure to add your vote above!

[Merged Post]

Is anyone at Quicken listening?

Yes and no. 😂 This Idea request currently has 25 votes. That indicates a fairly low level of interest among the Quicken Mac users who have participated in voting for features on this site. (For perspective: there are at least 75 Idea topics which have more than 25 votes, with an average vote count of 270 among the top 10 requests.) An Idea request needs to reach 30 votes for it to be forwarded to the developers for their consideration. So this Idea needs votes from 5 additional users to move to that next step.

That said, it should be noted that the developers don't act strictly or solely by vote count here. It's possible that this might be something that's already in their internal development plan.

As a historical note, the original print engine when Quicken Essentials for Mac (the first iteration of the modern Quicken Mac) had rows of light blue shading for each account and sub-account heading. (You can still see this in one of the old reports which remains int he program: the Category Summary report.) There were some user complaints in those days that printing reports wasted a LOT of color ink for all these color rows, so when the developers created a new reports engine in 2017, it was completely devoid of color. The old reports engine also printed negative values in red, but that went away in the color purge. I think the ideal solution would be to give users the ability to toggle between color or no color for reports; if/when this Idea topics reaches the developers, I hope they'll consider that if it doesn't make adding color too much more complicated.

This cannot be THAT big of an ask.

Over decades of experience with software development has taught me that unless you're intimately familiar with a program's code, you just cannot assume something is easy or complex to implement. Some things which appear simple turn out to be incredibly complex, and vice versa. But that's what the developers evaluate once feature request like this reaches them. They also evaluate how big an impact a potential feature will have, and on how many users, versus the dozens and dozens of other feature requests other users have been clamoring for, in order to decide how to prioritize it.

Short version: 5 more users need to vote for this idea to advance it to the development team for their evaluation and consideration.