By Livia Bergovoy…

We’ve been using Quicken since the good ole’ DOS days — before the venerable mouse. We still reflexively strike at keyboard shortcuts and some still work. But mostly, the fingers need to hover away from the keyboard to the mouse to get the job done (inefficient). What we miss the most is the ctrl-tab keyboard shortcut to move between the reports and the register. That is no longer available since the circa 2002 “upgrade.” What we are totally not interested in is — Intuit’s budgeting advice. Over the many years Intuit has forced numerous upgrades on us with very few rewards (at least to this user). The worst aspect of these upgrades has been when Intuit removed backward compatibility.

It used to be fun to track our investment portfolio. We used to reconcile the monthly statements mailed from what-ever-the-name-of-that-brokerage-house-was-called-before-it-became Ameritrade. That was also many upgrades ago. Then, Intuit made the investment interface so intrusive and complicated that we just gave the whole thing up. And… does anyone remember the really nice mortgage and loan calculator. For all we know that tool is still there — buried in the menubar. Ah, yes! the menu bar, which is filled with lures to sign up for credit cards and other Intuit products.

Our colleagues at Digital Family Advisor, went from a 1989 version of Andrew Tobias’ Managing Your Money to Microsoft Money Pro and Small Business Editions — and while it very difficult to get the latest version of these almost extinct financial software programs, when you do find it, they are backward compatible with any version…all the way back to 20 years. So why doesn’t Quicken (which the Feds would allow to be merged into Microsoft and) — still the leading home finance small business software, heed the requests from its millions of users?

All we wanted was and continue to want (– need as tech needs go) is the check printing feature, a few customizable reports, and a simple bank statement reconciliation interface.

That’s not too much to ask from a company that has nicely taken my once a year money for the last umpteen years…

Update: Found the loan calculator in the Quicken 2007 Premier version menubar: Planning > Financial Calculator.