Actually, I was happy to find that it saved a backup of my old budget prior
to shifting to S&S. When I went into Save/Load a Budget, it showed my old
one and I was able to restore it. Oddly enough it wouldn't make a backup
copy of my S&S before going back.

"Ronald Pierce" wrote:

- quote -

On Wed, 7 Feb 2007 11:30:03 -0800, Valdacil
<Valdacil[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

- quote -

There is a way to go back - open Help in M2007 and search for Advanced
Budget. There is a way to enter a special command in the navigation
bar in M2007 to recreate an advanced budget. I don't remember the
command and don't have M2007 at my finger tips at the moment.

- Ron

"Valdacil" <Valdacil[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:A525B0B5-B26B-4882-A977-C0B4CEBCDC69[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

It's not, but it's pretty well hidden. Search for 'Advanced Budget' in
Help, and follow the directions.
--
Chris Cowles
Gainesville, FL

I have been using MS Money since Money '95 (and every version inbetween) and
have used MSN Bill Pay (integrated w/ Money) since around '97 (think that was
when it was Checkfree, but MSN & Checkfree seem to be the same now). I was
recently required to upgrade to M2007 in order to get MSN Bill Pay working
again as the integration was changed. I went into the budget area to update
my budget and was prompted to accept the new Spending & Savings Budget. It
sounded interesting, so I accepted in order to check it out. How could I
know if I liked it or not if I didn't try it out? However, I didn't realize
it was a one way street.

While many of the features of S&S are quite nice, and do make my plan more
appearent, I am dismayed to find that certain functionality of my old budget
is now permanently lost. The biggest lost is the lack of integration between
the budget and the rest of my data. It just create more work when I have to
enter bill amounts in one location, then enter them again in my budget. I
miss my link to my bills section from the budget (aka, entering my gross pay
amount automatically from my paycheck, taxes, rent, etc.) Now I understand
that there was some discussion on this and that there were certain arguments
for certain 'specific scenarios' which warranted exclusion of the automatic
link, however the CHOICE should be offer to the user. I'm not opposed to
altering or upgrading features in software, however, in a piece of software
which has been running this long and people are accustomed to using it a
certain way, the more options you offer the better. For those people who
fell under these specific scenerios where automatic links to the bills
section was problematic, allow them to turn that feature off. It's very
simple... from the budget, the catagory shows the bill, rt. click the
catagory and select "Do Not Link to Bills". Problem solved. Those who don't
want it, don't have to have it... those who do can.

The biggest place where this causes a problem is with the Debt Reduction
Planner... a feature of Money itself. S&S won't even integrate with the rest
of the features of the MS Money program. I can understand people not wanting
to link to the bills in certain cases, but what was the rationale behind
removing the link to the Debt Reduction Planner. Because of the removal of
these two features, the new S&S budget is totally useless to me. I like the
simplified catagories better than the Advanced Budget's information overload
(but Essential Budget is too 'essential', not enough information), however
without the link to the rest of my data it's a chore to get accurate
information and I cannot do proper forecasting. Unfortunately, now I'm stuck
with S&S because there is no option to revert back to AB.

This is a feature that can be fixed in a service pack easily. I even
clicked on "Budget Settings" hoping to find a setting in there to
re-establish the link. Since the link with the rest of the data used to be
in Money, the code should still be around somewhere. The simple fix would be
to offer an option in the Budget Settings to allow/disallow the link with the
Bills/Debt Planner. The more advance fix which would make people much
happier with the software would be to allow a default setting (linked or not
linked), then allow (via rt. click on the specific line in the budget)
individual items to be included or not included. For instance, one scenario
suggested for the reason not to link the bills was due to landscaping costs
budgeted out, then ultimately since the work gets done by someone else, that
bill doesn't need to be paid (or in a different amount). However, I'm sure
that user doesn't mind the rest of their paycheck and other more "static"
bills being auto-linked from the bills area. So they can simply exclude the
single line for landscaping costs instead of losing a core functionality of
their budget over a single scenario. Again, the idea is that you can make
more people happy with your software (thus more uses... more copies of the
product sold... more repeat buyers) if you give them MORE options and let
them use the software in the manner which they think is best for them...
don't dictate how the program should be used.

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