- Quicken 2005 appears to use only Web access for downloading transactions, which means you have to navigate to downloading the transactions yourself -- and do so individually for each account. I remember when Quicken used to be able to download transactions for all your accounts, automatically, in a batch ... just one more way in which the "newer, improved" version is inferior to older versions. Hey, Intuit, "prettier visual bling" and "better" are not equivalent.
- It's next to bloody impossible to find the link on statefarm.com for downloading State Farm Bank transactions (see above). It seems like sometimes it's there, and sometimes it isn't, with no apparent rhyme or reason.
I mean, c'mon, people, there's an established electronic protocol for doing this. Quicken used to use it. But I guess making the user do all the repetitive gruntwork saves you some coding time, huh? And after all, Quicken 2005 is better. It must be better. It has a newer date on it, and you told everyone it was an upgrade.
Christ, it's almost enough to make you jump ship and try MS Money. I so can't wait to be able to run gnucash.
And, oh yeah .... I want to know where Intuit fished up this delusional idea that it was a good idea to [apparently] go out of their way to prevent you from EVER being able to simultaneously have data from more than one account visible at a time except in a report. Since I started using Quicken almost 15 years ago, it seems as though each successive new version has had more "features", but actually been less useful, because the things that you spend 95% of your time doing aren't "sexy" and therefore get no attention spent on them to ensure that they continue to work well. "Ooh! Shiny!" takes precedence over "functional" and over allowing you to set Quicken up to view your data the way you want to view it.
For example, I used to have my default Quicken desktop show me about the last ten transactions in each account, all at once. You can't do that any more. It won't LET you. Neither can you bring up two accounts side-by-side to, for example, cross-check transfers.
Or another example -- there's this shiny new "automatic renaming" feature that lets you correct the payee data for downloaded transactions automatically. Only problem is, when you download transactions, most of them come in with the payee field blank, and payee identifying data in the description. You cannot make Quicken rename based on the transaction description, only on the payee, which is blank. So this feature is, as far as I can tell, as utterly and totally useless as a bicycle is to a fish. What's more, the stupid damned thing creates a new renaming rule every time I correct a typo.
But it's a FEATURE!!!
(I'm reminded of one of the comments exchanged among the engineers at my Cadence interview about GUI administration tools -- "They make the commonplace trivial, and the difficult impossible.")