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Friday, December 18, 2009

The New Quicken Essentials for Mac 2010: If you need more advanced investment features, try Quicken Mac 2007



Quicken for Mac discontinued supporting the downloading of stock values for Quicken 2006 and previous versions, but there's a new Quicken coming in 2010 and you can buy it to get some of the features that were taken away from you.

Quicken Essentials for Mac Personal Finance Software - Mac Financial Software:
"Quicken Essentials for Mac allows you to track the overall value of your investment accounts and the value of your specific holdings. It will not, however, track investment buys and sells, nor will it provide some advanced investment performance reports. If you need more more advanced investment features, try Quicken Mac 2007."
I was hoping that the new version of Quicken for Mac would bring back online stock quote features of Quicken 2005.

It will bring quotes back, but not track buy and sell transactions.

Curious.

For those of us using the Macintosh version of Quicken, downloading stock quotes, a feature that we purchased when we initially bought the software has been discontinued on older versions of the software.

See:
Information for Quicken 2006 customers
As of April 30, 2009, in accordance with the Quicken discontinuation policy, online services1 and live technical support will no longer be available for Quicken 2006 users.

These services include online bill pay; downloading financial data from your bank, credit union, credit card, brokerage, 401(k), or mutual fund accounts; downloading stock quotes, news headlines, and other financial information into Quicken; uploading portfolio information from Quicken to Quicken.com; and providing access to the investing features on Quicken.com, including portfolio tracking, any watch lists you have created, One-Click Scorecard™, Stock Evaluator, and Mutual Fund Evaluator.

Here are the dates older versions of Quicken were retired:

Quicken 2006 – April 30, 2009
Quicken 2005 – April 30, 2008
Quicken 2004 – April 30, 2007
Quicken 2003 – April 25, 2006
Quicken 2002 – April 19, 2005
Quicken 2001 – April 19, 2005
Quicken 2000 – May 18, 2004
Quicken 98 and 99 – April 20, 2004
For additional information concerning this change, refer to Retiring Online Services for Older Versions of Quicken.
I think it's wrong for a main feature of a software package, like stock quote downloads, to be taken away, and then put in a newer version that we need to pay for.

It's forcing users to upgrade.

We initially bought Quicken to keep track of stock quotes.

That would be like car manufacturers discontinuing support of news radio in cars and making owners upgrade to get the news back.

Well, maybe not like that but you get the idea.

Still looking for a good Quicken replacement. What do you use?

There's a discussion over on MacInTouch.