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Quicken 2002 and QuickBase a Big Hit at User Group Officers Luncheon!
by Matt McCann and Richard Katz - December 23, 2001 at 19:13:25:
Matt McCann and Richard Katz (the McKatz Brothers) did one of their wildest opening presentations yet! This year, they showed up dressed as E.R. doctors with the past president of APCUG on a gurney... groaning and holding his stomach. They rolled the gurney behind a low curtain and performed wild surgery, pulling out debris like keyboards, hundreds of forks, other computer hardware and finally came to the problem with the patient, Microsoft Money. Upon removal, they did a Quicken implant and proclaimed to our amusement, that the patient would feel like a whole new person. The patient stood up, but it was no longer Dan Hanson, it was a hotel cocktail waitress in her regulation skimpy outfit (this IS, after all, Las Vegas). It was a very funny start to an exciting meeting.Matt and Richard showed Quicken 2002 Deluxe, which has some really intuitive new features since he showed it last year. Automatic categorization allows a user to type in an unknown payee name (like Dollar Video Rental) and Quicken automatically takes a best guess at what the category might be, in this case "video rental" and categorized it as Entertainment. It did it on its own! Matt then showed Portfolio Analyzer, which looks at your investments. It shows you your five best securities as well as your five worst investments (ouch!). In addition, it analyzes your total security holdings and creates an asset allocation pie chart with the press of a button. The Analyzer also shows you your portfolio's level of risk. New Automatic Reconciliation does on-the-fly reconciliation every time you update your account online. This happens without intervention when you download your data from your bank or credit card company. If it sees an error, like a missing transaction, or if your accounts don't balance, it notifies you on the spot! It's clear that Intuit is listening to their users and this Quicken 2002 is the result.
Matt and Richard also showed QuickBase, a new online database targeted to medium-sized businesses. What was particularly exciting, though, was that it worked equally well for tiny businesses! It allowed them to have technology previously only available to large corporations. They showed us how users could simultaneously be in very different locations and all work on one single project. In this case, they used their user group database, which used to be shared by mail. Matt said that even before the data could be put in a mailer, it would be out of date. Online, it's all up-to-date, all the time! Richard mentioned that the data was backed up daily (better than any of us regularly do). Some of the larger user group associations showed considerable interest in the distributed technology. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft may have been interesting, but these guys from the Quicken and QuickBase groups were wild!
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