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MoneyDance 2003 Reviewed
TheMadPenguin writes "For those of you who may not have heard, MoneyDance 2003 was released on March 28th, 2003 for general public consumption. It is available for Linux, MacOS X, and also Windows. Geared toward current Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money users, MoneyDance 2003 is packed full of features. It's reviewed at MadPenguin.org."
No way I'm four days worth of first posts.
Just no way.
If I don't hit the submit button soon them I'm sure...
Unless "Warning: Too many connections in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/madpenguin.org/httpdocs /mainfile.php on line 28
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is the article text.
Already!! There are no comments on this story and it's already slashdotted.
Article Text: MadPenguin does the tango with MoneyDance 2003 (Posted on Tuesday, April 22 @ 22:12:13 EDT ) For those of you who may not have heard, MoneyDance 2003 was released on March 28th, 2003 for general public consumption. It is available for Linux, Mac OSX, and also Windows. Geared toward current Intuit Quicken and Microsoft Money users, MoneyDance 2003 is packed full of features. This is more than a software release to the Linux world. It is a step forward. Until now, Linux had a fairly large hole which was void of proper personal finance software (aside from the obvious gnucash), but MoneyDance seems to be on the right track to bridging that gap. At one time, when the software was dropped by the company that owned it, the outlook appeared bleak... but since it's been given new life by it's original developer, Reilly Technologies, MoneyDance appears to have a bright future. On to the review... by MadJudu: When asked if I was interested in reviewing MoneyDance 2003, I jumped at the opportunity. As a long-time Windows user and Computer Applications Instructor I have been eagerly awaiting software such as MoneyDance to make my conversion from Windows to Linux complete. It has been a slow process finding quality, sophisticated Linux software that is comparable to their Windows counterparts. Fortunately in banking software I have found a keeper with MoneyDance and am one step closer to making this happen. Below are my observations on this great software. INSTALLATION The installation was quick and easy. I filled out the information on their free download link and that took me to the instruction page. The instructions were simple and few, just the way I like it. This was my first unsupervised Linux install. The only thing I needed an explanation for was the following symbol "%>" which is the Konsole prompt. At first I didn't realize that I wasn't supposed to type that along with the command. IMPORTING QIF FILES I created nine exported QIF files from Quicken, which contained all the info for my accounts. There were three bank, four credit, and two cash accounts. The first time you open MoneyDance the opening screen has three options: Create New File, Open Existing File and Import File. The program already knows that you're importing a QIF file once you click on the Import File button. All the accounts imported easily, however there were a number of duplicate transactions created in the process. The help files noted that this is a possibility and that you may have to "find and remove a duplicate transaction or two." In the case of a year's worth of transactions, it would be more than a few duplicates and wasn't worth the trouble. I ended up not importing the two cash accounts. All the other accounts imported without creating duplicates and with the same balances that were on the original Quicken accounts. As soon as I added the cash accounts, most of the account balances changed with the added duplicate files. I do not believe that this is a problem with MoneyDance as much as it is a problem with the originating software. It would be preferable if QIF files included all the bank accounts in one QIF instead of one QIF for each individual account. With this design it would seem that duplicates are inevitable. This is something to consider when trying to decide whether to transfer your account information to MoneyDance or just start fresh with a brand new file and go from there. As a side note, I noticed that there is also an option to import OFX (Open Financial Exchange) through the Menu Bar if your current banking software does not use QIF. EASE OF USE The program is simple and easy to use. All accounts are shown in your Root Account (Home Page) in a kind of "snapshot" format. It lists each name and account balance. From there you can select an account and go into that register. Whatever account you choose to use, each new transaction is shown as a blank check. You just fill in the appropriate blanks and select Record. There are useful features that are similar to Quicken such as the date shortcu
I feel you should read the writings of Stallman, in particular the article about the early days of the GNU project. In particular, I'd note that Stallman made a living for many years by selling tapes with emacs on for $150 - it's free software, but people paid for it.
The issue of free software has very little to do with "cheapness", and everything to do with long term benefits for all.
This is a fairly common mistake on Slashdot - stating your position does not make it valid. Stallman has quite eloquently argued that for various social, economic and technical reasons it's better for software to be free than proprietary. He's never said proprietary software is "evil", and apart from some excitable ACs on /. I have yet to see anybody else claim that either.
So, if you want to be taken seriously, you're going to have to:
a) Respond to Stallmans arguments.
b) Provide some of your own showing that proprietary software is a good thing.
Quick tip about the second one - saying "that's how it's always worked" is not an argument.
Your last paragraph confuses me - it appears to imply that free software is always lacking in features to proprietary software. No matter how much I'm willing to pay, I'm unable to get a version of Internet Explorer that has tabs built in, or that has non-lame JavaScript error reporting without crash-prone extra debuggers, which in fact is currently frustrating my work no end (which is why I'm reading slashdot :). Convenience is an entirely separate issue.
And in fact in this case it appears from some of the comments that GNUcash is significantly more stable and integrated on Linux at any rate than MoneyDance. I don't know enough to compare features.