P2.3. About This Book

Despite the many improvements in Quicken over the years, one feature consistently falls short: Intuit's documentation. For a topic as complicated as personal finance, all you get with Quicken is an electronic copy of Getting Started with Quicken, which is little more than a list of tasks Quicken performs, with a few step-by-step instructions.

Even if you don't mind reading instructions in one window as you work in another, you'll quickly discover that Quicken Help often isn't worth the screen space it consumes. The help topics usually cover the basic material you already know, but fail to answer the burning questions that made you launch Help in the first place. You have two options for finding help topics: an expandable table of contents and a search feature. There's no index for you to quickly scroll through. In addition, Quicken Help rarely tells you why you might want to use any feature. And with onscreen help, underlining key points, jotting hard-earned insights in margins, and reading about Quicken while sitting in the bathtub are out of the question.

Quicken 2009: The Missing Manual is the book that should have come with Quicken 2009. Although each version of Quicken introduces new features and enhancements, you'll still find this book useful if you're tracking your finances in an earlier version of Quicken. (Of course, the older your version of the program, the more dissimilarities you'll run across.)

In this book, you'll find step-by-step instructions for using the most popular and useful Quicken features, including those you may not quite understand, let alone know how to do: budgeting (Chapter 11), recording investment transactions (Chapter 12), archiving Quicken data files (Section 15.3), and so on. Along the way, the book helps you evaluate Quicken's features and decide which ones are the most useful to you.

Quicken 2009: The Missing Manual is designed to accommodate readers at every technical level. The primary discussions are written for beginner or intermediate Quicken users. But if you're a first-time Quicken user, special boxes titled "Up To Speed" provide the introductory information you need to understand the topic at hand. Advanced users should watch for similar boxes labeled "Power Users' Clinic," which offer technical tips, tricks, and shortcuts for the experienced Quicken fan.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION Importing Data into Quicken

Why can't I import data into Quicken? One of the biggest changes in recent years (starting with Quicken 2005) is the format that Intuit uses to communicate with financial institutions. The old format was called QIF (Quicken Interchange Format). The new format, called OFX (Open Financial Exchange), makes it much easier to activate accounts for online financial services through Quicken and to download transactions from financial institutions into Quicken accounts. Unfortunately, OFX eliminates the ability to import transactions to Quicken's checking, savings, credit card, 401(k), and brokerage accounts, but you can still import transactions into asset, liability, and cash accounts. (Full details on all these account distinctions await you in the pages ahead.) Because Quicken 2009 limits the use of the old QIF format, you can no longer import data from other programs (which was helpful if you wanted to convert data from programs other than Microsoft Money which you can convert using a special tool), from Quicken data files (sometimes helpful with data corruption issues), or from financial institutions that opted not to support Quicken's new OFX format. To make matters worse, Intuit also dropped support for online financial services that use the old format, rendering Quicken versions prior to 2005 useless for downloading transactions or paying bills online. Express Web Connect is one attempt to lessen the pain. With Express Web Connect, you can use One Step Update to download transactions (Section 6.5.2) even from financial institutions that don't support direct connections to Quicken. If you're just getting started with Quicken, all this controversy may seem like a tempest in a teapot. But many Quicken fans consider these changes draconian measures on Intuit's part. Unfortunately, if you want to use the program's online financial services, you have to use Quicken 2005 or later, or choose a different program.