You know the drill.

"William R Wood" <w.wood[at]cox.net> wrote in message
news:uXMvW6vrFHA.1252[at]TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
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No, not once they expire it.

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If for no other reason. I can't back-level my M04 file. Besides, one-by-one,
they appear to be expiring the versions without regard to whether they had
an explicit cutoff when sold.

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Many things about BP require that you align your expectations with the way
it actually reports data.

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R-click details and there they are. That's what's so stupid about it.

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I'm betting somebody in a focus group said "Yikes! You mean it shows my
account number?" when they saw this screen and right after they said how
neat they thought it was that the application could fetch all of this data
freom Yodlee without understanding the implication that being able to do one
implies having knowledge of the other.

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Yay verily!

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I've been meaning to look into MD in greater depth. Real Soon Now.

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Sad, isn't it?

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I'm not sure how Quicken is doing it now, but they were using customized
reports exported as .XML. I can say for certainty that there's lots of stuff
that you can't get at just from reports. I'm not sure what MD will be able
to do to better address this. Microsoft just hasn't cooperated with opening
the environment up. Given that it's my data, I find this pretty offensive.

"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:ebkUx2ZrFHA.2008[at]TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl...
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I don't understand what Steve means, "if only for the quotes". I am using
2002 and download quotes (and bank/broker statements) every day . I read
that MSFT will or has cut off auto downloads for 2004 but can't you still do
manual downloads of quotes and bank/broker statements? If not, why don't
you upgrade to 2002. I have extensively tested every version of Money since
it first came out and 2002 is the best: cleanest interface, least major
bugs, no advertising, and the useless idiotic features can easily be turned
off or ignored since they do not get in your face. Money 2004 is worthless
to me because of a bug in the budget reports and I don't like the extra
bloat. In investment accounts starting with 2003, transfers from the
linked cash account to the investment account show up in budget reports as
income or expense which, of course, is absurd since transfers are not income
or expense and have nothing to do with budgets. So if I execute a trade and
buy 1000 shs MSFT (just kidding!) in Jan, my budget reports show a huge
expense which blows my budget through the roof the first month!! I know
that individual transactions can be excluded from budget reports but what if
you are a stock trader and enter 20-100 trades a week. I have begged MSFT
to let users exclude these transfers as an option ever since 2003 introduced
this bug but they refuse.


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I just checked out 2006 last week and agree that it is not significantly
worse than 2004 as best I can remember back that far. But 2006 is vastly
worse than 2002 and I would never even consider exposing myself to the
idiotic XXXX type aggravations. The Tools/Options mess in 2006 boggles my
mind whereas 2002's tabbed dialog box handles that material beautifully.
Basically 2006 does what 2002 does but nothing more. However, the interface
is different in 2006 and various actions must be done in a different way for
no good reason. The differences in 2006 are not better, they are merely
different. Why should I expose myself to the chore of learning a new
interface for no functional gain plus I have to put up with advertising and
XXXX sillyness. By the way that XXXX stuff is a major substantive negative.
I type my account numbers in the account list in 2002 because I constantly
need to see them.!!! Hiding my account numbers with XXXX forces me to look
them up. What were they thinking????? Given these massive annoyances and
MSFT's nasty deal about automatic dowloads being cancelled in 2 years, makes
buying 2006 a reward for bad behavior that I cannot accept. MSFT is trying
to force upgrades by expiring auto downloads. If they get away with that
approach, what incentive do they have to improve the program. They have
users by the you know what at that point and can coast for years with little
risk of loosing customers who become hooked on auto downloads. No way am I
rewarding them for that cute trick.



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Look closer at Moneydance and join the user forum. Sean, the developer, is
quite responsive. A major upgrade is due late summer/fall and you should
run it side-by-side with Money for a couple of months. MD is not up to
Money 2002 at this point but I think there is a real chance that it will
catch up. You would be an asset to the MD project by contributing your
suggestions for improvements. Unlike MSFT, Sean will listen and act on
reasonable user suggestions. I bought MD and ran it side-by-side with 2002
for 2 months earlier this year and I can tell you that it works and will
handle most folks needs right now. I plan to switch to MD as soon as it
will handle investments to my satisfaction and give me the reports I need.
I plan to switch not because Money 2002 doesn't work, but because MSFT has
finally annoyed me to the point that I can no longer tolerate their
behavior.

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Intuit is just a bad as MSFT if not worse. I used Quicken for about 10
years. Money is significantly better. I was forced to switch to Money in
the late 90's because Quicken could not handle my option trades or bond
trades. Intuit blew me off repeatedly when I demonstrated the math errors
the program made and the incorrect reports that were generated for IRS
schedules that I wanted to file with my tax returns. Money handled all my
trades and reports correctly and 2002 has continued to work perfectly with
our rather complex finances and budget now that I trade less in retirement.

The other problem switching to or even trying Quicken is that, as of the
last time I checked about a year ago, Quicken still did not have a file
conversion routine that would allow you to import your Money data file into
Quicken. There was a manual method but it was very convoluted. Data
conversion is also a problem with the current version of Moneydance. MD
will import Quicken files ok but Money files are still a problem. Hopefully
this issue will be resolved soon.



--
Regards,

Bill Wood
Fountain Hills, AZ

Comments below.

"Steve" <sjcohen730[at]aol.com> wrote in message
news:1125409220.237311.220640[at]o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
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You may certainly be correct and it's not as though the thought hasn't
occured to me. I'm not at all thrilled with this, though. I hate to "Reward
Bad Behavior" as Our President said about negotiating with North Korea right
up until he started doing it. It's not that M06 is functionally no worse
than M04, even though that seems like an absurdly low bar for a software
"upgrade" that costs actual, though tiny, money. It's all of the
unfunctional stuff that just is like fingernails on a chalkboard to me that
makes it seem like such a downgrade from M04. The five or six or seven or
eight different menu/navigation schemes on each window when there wasn't
enough real estate devoted to the actual data payload in the first place.
The stupid security theater trick of xxxing the account numbers in Account
List. The incessant ads, in my field of view everytime I open an account
register, urging me to find a great deal on a home equity loan or a car loan
or whatever. (That's probably #1 on my Slightly Irrational Reasons I Hate
M05+ list.) The nightmare that was Tools|Options. The incessant connection
to the Internet when I start it. (Is that still there in M06?) I could go
on. And NOT ONE improvement in its function for how I actually use it--to
say nothing of the bugs that live on and on like the Energizer Bunny.

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I don't find it at all hard to consider. I've done some research on current
versions of Quicken and read up on MoneyDance. I've played with GnuCash. I
put several hundred hours into building a replacement core DB and developing
Money-CSV-report-based ways to extract all transaction data from Money to
the replacement core DB. My requirements aren't all that high; I want
something with at least the functionality that was in M02 or maybe even M97
or 99. Classification is the only barrier here that seems difficult across
the board. Why this is difficult, when Mv2 had it and Quicken for DOS had
it, seems mysterious to me.

Re. Quicken, I don't fear a transition learning curve. It can't be that
hard. I fear a transition loss of data.

Why would I consider it? Because more than ever before I think Microsoft is
not interested in developing Money as a personal finance manager
application. They are only interested in developing it as a vector to
services they can sell and market. They'd make the locally executed
application go away in a heartbeat if they had the web-based
subscription-model platform to move us to done.

Dick,
Based on the way you apparently work with Money which is
somewhat similar to me, (ie) no automatic download of data, manual
input of transactions, I believe that after extensive testing of Money
2006 which I know you will do, you will probably find that although
Money 2006 Premium is NOT any better than Money 2004 Deluxe, it is not
any worse either, AS LONG AS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING WITH THE
PRODUCT, and you do.
I have the feeling you will eventially upgrade to 2006 if only for the
quotes. Good luck. Steve.

P.S. How could you even consider switching to Quicken after all the
years working with Money. The transition learning curve to get up to
speed would be much more than I would be willing to invest as far as
time versus the benefits.

Most M06 users don't. There have been a few other reports, however.

"Don Awalt" <donawalt[at]removethisgmail.com> wrote in message
news:uSCxa6UrFHA.2272[at]TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
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I have been using M06 for about 3 weeks, fresh install after using M04 on
the same PC, and I never saw the performance problems you reported.


"Dick Watson" <littlegreengecko[at]mind-enufalready-spring.com> wrote in
message news:ent33JRrFHA.908[at]tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...
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My initial testing of the M06 trial on my laptop was quickly terminated due
to an incredibly poor performance level which was reported here. Last week I
posted an M06 page (http://umpmfaq.info/Money2006.htm) that said, basically,
I really couldn't evaluate it fairly in my environment due to the abysmal
performance I was experiencing; but based on my limited use of it, I could
not see anything about it--besides performance in my environment and with my
data--that changes the fundamental conclusions I reached about M05 and
documented at http://umpmfaq.info/Money2005.htm.

As readers of my postings know, the hard disk that was in the machine when
that testing was done picked a very inopportune moment--the first attempt to
boot it on a five day trip to the opposite end of the country--to crap out.
Now that I've put in a new disk, rebuilt the system to a shadow of its
former self (so many settings, so little time) and gotten the website
development environment re-engineering project completed, I decided to go
back and revisit M06 Trial.

Lo and behold, performance of M06 on this system is now not appreciably
worse than M05 was. I can't say if it's much better or worse than M04 was on
this system because it's been so long since I've tried that combination.
Based on all of the available data, I'd guess it's in the same order of
magnitude. That's certainly not great, but it is tolerable.

I have started a dual track trial period for M06 against M04--after all,
I've already got Groceries and Dining Out back where they belong--and will
run in parallel for a while longer and then post and update the M06 page
with my results.

It certainly seems likely I will not see anything that changes the
fundamental conclusions I reached about M05. But we are that much closer to
the expiration of M04 and I still don't see a better alternative on the
horizon. (Though I have been considering a MoneyDance trial and am
researching whether the Q06 trial version has Money Import capability. They
claim such a capability for the retail version.) I did concede that my
position on M05 had a protest vote component to it and that it would
probably not have any impact on the direction of the product in the long
term.

In the interest of full disclosure, I though I should post this.

---

So, why was there a **huge** difference in performance before and after the
hard disk replacement? I get to three possibilities from some quick fault
tree analysis: 1) some software issue present on the old system has been
flushed by the reload, 2) some systemic issue with the old--and maybe
already ill--disk hardware, and 3) some issue with the old hardware that was
incompatible with some performance optimization or expectation in Money that
the new hardware doesn't have.

As to #1, I can't discount it completely but doubt it because it was so
localized to Money and I generally run a pretty Good Housekeeping Seal
system in terms of the stuff that gets on it and the patch level maintenance
and so forth. As to #2, I tend to discount this because the machine
otherwise ran fine and it ran terribly for Money with my data file or with
the sample file or with the files locally or on a network server. As to #3,
this seems a possibility in part because previous postings on the subject by
Russ Paul-Jones said they'd had some reports of issues with specific
combinations of laptop and disk drive. I also changed the type/performance
level of the drive significantly in the process. For the record, the system
is a Sony PCGR505TSK, the disk was a Hitachi DK23BA-20 (20GB, ATA-5, 4,200
RPM, 2MB cache) (legacy Hitachi) and is now a Hitachi Travelstar 5K100
HTS541080G9AT00 (80GB, ATA-6, 5,400 RPM, 8MB cache) (legacy IBM). The host
attach is an Intel 82801BA.