Don't even bother with quicken 2007 for mac

The internet is awash with horror stories about transferring data from PC Quicken to Mac Quicken. I followed the instructions which basically say:

• make sure all account names and category names are less than 15 characters long.
• export securities, categories, accounts, and transactions all separately.
• then import them in the same order on the mac

Seriously Intuit, 15 character limit? And "because of differences in how Windows and Mac handle transactions, you might have to move some transactions to the correct accounts"? What is the problem - do the Mac and the PC guys live on the opposite sides of the tracks?

For me the problem was that all the accounts were thousands of dollars different than what the PC had to begin with. I decided to punt.

First I looked at other solutions. I downloaded money dance. Looked nice, but I could only enter 100 transactions. This meant I could not fully test it before buying it.

Quicken for Mac cost me $70 at the Apple store - but I already have a copy of Quicken 2006 for PC. So, I decided the best thing to do is to use my PC copy. To do this I had to spend $80 for a copy of VMWare Fusion. It worked perfectly. Download, install, install windows, install Quicken, transfer the files. Bam! All data is correct, and we get the same exact UI we are used to. To make sure windows stays stable I don't give it internet access nor can it see the Mac's hard drive. I also turned off Windows Update. Seems safe.... Takes a few gigs of disk space - but that doesn't matter too much to me.

Using the VMWare software cost me $10 more than Quicken for Mac 2007. Best part is it only took me a half an hour to get this working. I'd already spent five hours not getting it to work the other way.

Lucky the Quicken box says there is a 60 day money back guarantee. Can't wait to see how difficult it is to get that honored!

Judging by the internet chatter by Mac users switching from PC, I bet that Intuit will loose a bit if they don't get their transfer story straightened out...

How did you deal with your Quicken data transfer?