Microsoft Money

Microsoft has abandoned its Money personal-finance program, so you would have had to export your Money data to Quicken whether you switched to the Mac or not.

It’s easy enough to export your Money data into Quicken for the Mac, although not every scrap of information comes through alive. You’ll lose your Money abbreviations, comments, and Lifetime Planner information. Fortunately, the important stuff—your accounts and the transactions in them, including categories, classes, and stocks that you’ve set up—come through in one piece.

Unfortunately, you have to export one account at a time. Furthermore, you’ll be creating something called a QIF (Quicken Interchange Format) file as an intermediary between Windows and the Mac—and this file format can’t handle category names longer than 15 characters. Before you begin, then, you might want to take a moment either to shorten them or to make a note of which ones might get truncated in the transfer.

Ready? Fire up Money on your Windows PC and then proceed like this:

  1. Choose File→Export.

    The Export dialog box appears. It wants to know if you are exporting your information to another version of Money (“Loose QIF”) or to some other, rival financial program that shall, as far as Microsoft is concerned, remain nameless.

  2. In the resulting dialog box (Figure 7-2), choose Strict QIF, and then click OK.

    Now you’re supposed to name and save the exported file. Make sure you give each account a descriptive name (like Citibank Savings).

  3. Specify a name and a folder on your PC for the exported file, and then click OK.

    Repeat these three steps for each of your Money accounts.

  4. Specify the kind of account (usually you’ll want Regular, not Investment), and which one of your accounts to export.

    Click OK when the exporting is done.

  5. Transfer the exported files to the Mac.

    You can do it via network, email, or any of the other techniques described in Chapter 6. Then move to the Macintosh, open Quicken, and create a new file (see the Quicken instructions). Then, once you’ve got an empty “check register” before you, continue like this:

    Use the Strict QIF option. It lops off category names longer than 15 characters.

    Figure 7-2. Use the Strict QIF option. It lops off category names longer than 15 characters.

  6. Choose File→Import QIF. In the “Select a QIF file” dialog box, navigate to, and open, the first exported account file.

    When the dust settles, you’ll see your Money transactions safely ensconced in Quicken. (If you see a message that some transactions couldn’t be completed, don’t worry; it’s usually just telling you that some of your category names were longer than 15 characters and have been marked with asterisks to help you spot them.)

If you have more than one account, choose File→New Account to set it up, and then repeat from step 4 to bring in your other Money accounts.

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