Running Quicken on a Mac

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Level 1

0 points

Running Quicken on a Mac

I'm in the process of buying a computer for my parents. My mom has used Macs for most of her computer life, but my dad is completly new to them. I am going to buy them an iMac, and I'm nervous that my dad won't like it and continue to use their painfully slow windows machine. Currently, the biggest concern I have is using Quicken and turbo tax on a mac. My dad uses quicken 2003, and I had planned to buy quicken 2007 for mac, and transfer all of his files over. However, I've done some reading and discovered that quicken for Mac has horrible reviews.

The other option I have is to put XP on the machine using boot camp, and buy a version of Quicken for windows. However, I am concerned that my dad will think this is too complicated, and continue to use his old version.

Does anyone have any advice as to what they would do? Also, has anyone used Quicken on their mac? My dad also uses turbo tax, but I'm pretty sure thats a windows only program.

MBP, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Nov 19, 2008 12:29 PM

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Answer 1

a brody

Level 10

85,308 points

Nov 19, 2008 1:01 PM in response to ndrwsybs

Welcome to Apple Discussions!

Turbotax is also available for the Mac.
I can't answer regarding anything how good the latest Quicken for the Mac is. I basically gave up on Quicken and started using spreadsheets in its place.

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Answer 2

Nov 19, 2008 1:14 PM in response to ndrwsybs

I know a lot of people that use Quicken on their Macs and it seems to work just fine for them. The best thing you could do is try it because it's a much better option then installing Windows just to run Quicken. The last time I filed I used Turbo Tax online.

George

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Answer 3

babowa

Level 9

78,562 points

Nov 19, 2008 1:37 PM in response to ndrwsybs

I'm using Quicken 2006 and I must say it's the most unstable version I've encountered (started with the 2003 version I believe); although I've registered it a long time ago and used it many times since then, it'll still give me the "would you like to register" window every time I open it; it also likes to freeze up in the middle of entering any data necessitating a force quit. But, since I only use it to keep track of some investments (have never used the tax preparation form or updated current stock prices online), I deal with its' quirks. Other than that, I've found it less than useful and do everything else on a spreadsheet I've created in Numbers.

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Answer 4

Dec 17, 2008 6:35 AM in response to ndrwsybs

I bought a new iMac and tried to switch from the Windows version of Quicken to the Mac version. It was (and is) a nightmare. I spent multiple hours getting my balances to line up. I did not do my homework up front on Quicken for Mac. I've used Quicken for 10+ years on Windows and have never had any trouble upgrading versions. I was expecting the same seamless transition here. Wrong.

I think I'm going to abandon Quicken for Mac and buy Parallels to run Quicken for Windows on my Mac.

Does anyone have experience with that?

John

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Answer 5

Jan 20, 2009 7:30 AM in response to John Dawley

I agree that Quicken for Mac and Quicken for Windows are very different - I have been using Quicken for Mac for something like 20 years and never really had any problems at all. I recently tried to upgrade my mom from Quicken 2003 on windows to Quicken 2009 - but she got the starter edition - which cannot import files from any other version of quicken except Quicken 2008 Starter - and their website does not show an option to upgrade from Starter to Deluxe - it has all been rather frustrating. The only reason I had her buy the new version is that the printing functions on the old version stopped working. Also very annoying on windows that you have to uninstall the previous version in order to install the new version. On the up side she has very little data in there and was planning to start a new clean file this year anyway - just a pain trying to get the old data out.

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Answer 6

El Deanio

Level 3

809 points

Jan 20, 2009 7:53 AM in response to ndrwsybs

I use iBank version 2.

The latest version is here.

http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibank/

I can download Quicken files direct from my Bank's online account (other file formats too, including csv). Takes a while to set up but being able to download one's statements as Quicken files makes that a bit easier especially compared with having to type everything in manually from printed out statements

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Answer 7

Jan 20, 2009 9:21 AM in response to ndrwsybs

You can't upgrade Quicken on Windows like you like. You really just have to start over. Basically, Quicken only supports upgrading form the last version (and it doesn't really support moving between platforms). That's supposed to change this year, but it's still an issue. Quicken 2009 for Mac was meant to address a number of these issues, but I doubt backwards compatibility is a focus. There are a few other Quicken-alikes which are far more backwards compatible than Quicken's own products. Intuit really doesn't stand behind their product and it shows.

That said, I wouldn't be afraid of setting up XP and VMWare to run Quicken on his machine. You can easily set it up so that it is completely transparent to him and he'll never realize that he's running a non-Mac app. You can run it in seamless more and you see no desktop and files are stored in Mac directories and are Mac files.

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