Migrating back to Quicken 2003
September 2, 2006So when I bought my HP laptop a while back, it came with Microsoft Money 2005 pre-installed. I was a long-time Quicken user but frankly the last few upgrades had been underwhelming and buggy. So I didn’t hesitate to migrate up to Money 2005.
I’ve been reasonably happy with Money, it does what I need it to do and it sometimes seems pretty smart. Like if it can, it sometimes makes a guess about the category that an entry belongs in. If the name of the place sounds like a cafe, Money will insert “Dining Out” into the category spot. It’s actually a bit eerie the first time it happened, when I was entering some receipts for a business trip. These were restaurants I’d never been to but since they had names like “Thai Palace” Money made a guess that it was a place to eat.
However, I’m going to be giving the laptop to my Mom at the end of September (she needs it when she flies to the Philippines to work on her charity project there). So I need to move to financial software on my home PC. The problem is I don’t have the install disks for Money, it was bundled pre-installed on the HP. But I do still have the last somewhat stable version of Quicken that I liked, Quicken 2003.
Turns out the down-grade is surprisingly easy–export as a strict QIF file from Money 2005, and reload into Quicken 2003. There are so far only two issues, one minor and the other annoying. The minor issue is that you can’t apparently export multiple accounts in a QIF file. So I’ve had to export/import each account separately.
The one issue that’s annoying is that the QIF format, at least in the strict compatibility mode, doesn’t allow for unlimited length of category names. It truncates at 15 characters. I’ve got some long category names, so they’re all getting truncated when I move over to Quicken. Not a huge deal but annoying.
Otherwise it has gone surprisingly smoothly. Now I just have to move my Picasa photos and all my bookmarks off the laptop. Then I can run the restore CD’s to bring it back to its original software state.