 [Larger view] | Microsoft Money Deluxe 2005
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Average user rating:  | |
| Please do not buy - it is painful! | |
| I have been a user of Money for years, and I love(d) it. However, my upgrade from 2004 to 2005 has been so problematic and frustrating. I cannot recommend that anyone purchase this product.
Money 2005 decided it would be fun to duplicate all of my transactions, and split every split transaction into several separate and unlabeled, uncategorized transactions. This caused my balances to be off in several accounts by as much as $80,000! And for some inconceivable reason, Money then decided to TRIPLE many of my transactions, leaving me with a lovely (but completely incorrect) account balance of $122,000. This problem occurs not only in my accounts that I download to, but also in my hand-entered accounts, like cash. In addition, all of my categories have been tripled. I have spent days waiting for email responses (both of which were completely unhelpful and did not address my problems), and I've spent over an hour on a long-distance phone call (Why in the world does Microsoft not provide a 1-800 number for tech support? Is it because they know they will get 100's of calls a day?), getting incredibly lame responses like "oh, just delete those hundreds of accidental duplicate transactions." I find this product to be incomplete, frustrating, time-consuming and useless. I will be going back to Money 2004. | |
| Lots of Potential Overshadowed by Problems | |
| MS Money Deluxe 2005 has a lot of potential but has bugs that make it a waste of time.
First: accounts are updated by institution. If you close an account at that institution, you cant close it in Money unless you close that institution entirely in Money. Also, for some reason, accounts get duplicated in Money. If you want to delete the duplicate, you have to delete all accounts for institution. the only solution I found was to manually "adjust" the duplicate account to 0. Second: Want to make an alternate budget plan for when your life changes? (like after school, after marriage, new job, lost job, ect...?) The new Money file you will open to do this will incorporate only SOME of your accounts, and will erase your old budget entirely, making you work from scratch. Third: Want to use your money file on multiple computers? Say, when out of town, work with it on your laptop, then update those changes on your desktop? NO way--you can view the changes on the other computer if you let MS have all your financial info stored on the web, but you cant work the same file on both machines. You can save your data to the web from one machine and then use that data in a new file on the other machine, but some accounts do not get incorporated onto your new file, and changes to your budget do not get incorporated onto your new file. Fourth: Why in the world can't you take your money file, work with it on one computer, back it up to a floppy, and work with it on another computer??? Imagine having a word processor that would only let you view and edit your documents on the original machine where it was created? THAT WOULD BE ABSURD, AND THAT IS WHAT MS MONEY DOES?!! MS purposefully went to great lengths to make this software IMPOSSIBLE TO USE IN ANY MEANINGFUL PRODUCTIVE WAY. I hate MS money now. It is not expensive, but when you spend hours and hours trying to fix problems until you realize that there is nothing you can do, it is very frustrating. An excel spreadsheet is easier, If you have good handwriting a pencil and paper is better. THIS SOFTWARE IS JUNK. | |
| Good fun balancing accounts | |
| Great job, Microsoft, on another quality product!
Trivia question: what do you get when you cross the usability of Lotus Notes with the stability of Mac OS 9 and the security of Internet Explorer? That's right - Microsoft Money 2005! Seriously though, it won't properly download 90 days of transactions from my checking account into a BRAND NEW FILE without garbling stuff. Back to the cesspool from whence it came... |
