Even More Great Quicken Tips - Page 6

"I'm Dropping In Another Load Of Tips!!!"

TIP: MAKING A LIST, CHECKING IT TWICE--PART 3 OF 4

In the past two tips, we've shown you how to use the Financial Address Book to keep track of the individuals to whom you wish to send a holiday greeting.
To recap, choose Lists + Track Important Addresses. Next, select Options + Set Up Group from the Address Book's menubar, to create a group named Holiday Cards; then assign that group name to the intended recipients.
Finally, sort the records by choosing the Holiday Cards group from the Group dropdown list.
Now that you've got your list of holiday card recipients, it's time to produce a printout of the names and addresses and keep it handy as you address your cards.

To print the names and addresses:
1. In the financial Address Book screen, choose File + Print.
2. In the Print field, select Address Book.
3. Select Standard Paper in the On field.
4. In the Print Range section, make sure All addresses currently shown is selected.
5. Click OK to print the records listing.

TIP: MAKING A LIST, CHECKING IT TWICE--PART 4 OF 4

In our last tip, we showed you how to print out the list of names and addresses in your Holiday Card group so that you can refer to them as you address your holiday cards. To save even more time, why not print the names and addresses directly onto mailing labels? Or better yet, print addresses directly onto the envelopes themselves. In this tip, we'll show you how to do just that.

To print to mailing labels:
1. From the menubar of the Address Book menu, choose File + Print Preview. (You should always preview a print job such as this.)
2. In the Preview field, select Labels.
3. In the On field, select the type of mailing labels to print to. Click OK. (You should first check with Quicken to see which types of labels are supported before you go out and purchase your labels. Generally speaking, Quicken doesn't support as many different label types, as say, a word processing or database program.)
4. Select Print standard mailing labels in the Type of Labels to Print.
5. If you wish to print a separate sheet of your own return address labels, select Print One Page of Return Labels and then enter the return address in the area provided.
6. Click OK to preview the print job. Click twice to zoom in on the print preview. If all is to your satisfaction, click the Print button located at the top right of the preview screen to print the names and addresses onto the mailing labels. Otherwise click Close to return to the main address book window.

To print to envelopes:
1. Choose File + Print Preview.
2. In the Preview field, select Envelopes.
3. In the On field, note that Quicken only supports a single envelopesize, in this case, the standard business envelope, which is rarely the size of a holiday card envelope. If you are using an envelope of a different size you might want to consider printing your names and addresses to mailing labels.
4. Click OK.
5. If you'd like to include a return address, select the Print Return Address option in the Print Envelope window and enter the return address in the space provided.
6. In the lower portion of the dialog box, indicate the type of manual feed that you will be using to feed the envelopes into the printer (horizontal or vertical feed).
7. Click OK to preview the print job. Double-click the mouse to zoom in on the printout if necessary. Click the Next Page button to preview the next name and address.
8. If all is to your satisfaction, click the Print button located at the top right of the preview screen. Otherwise click Close to return to the main address book window.

TIP: PEEK AT YOUR FINANCIAL NEEDS WITH BILLMINDER

You always want to keep up to date on the bills you have to pay and other financial due dates, but loading Quicken every morning to see what's on the day's financial bumer can be a pain in the you-know-what. Why not set the Billminder to display at startup so that you can decide whether you want to run Quicken at that moment? Billiminder gives you a list of all your upcoming financial events.Then you decide whether you want to face your finances that day.

To activate the Billminder:
1. Choose Edit + Options + Reminders.
2. Click the Bilminder tab.
3. Select Show Billminder When Starting Windows.
4. Click OK.

The next time you start your PC and after Windows has loaded, the Billminder appears, listing all your upcoming financial events. Click the Run button to start Quicken or click Exit to shut down the Billminder.

TIP: CLASSIFYING YOUR DEBT One of the neat things about Quicken is that, while you can record payments made to your credit cards and watch your checking account balance decrease, you can also transfer these payments into the appropriate credit card account and watch the balance of your credit card debt decrease (hopefully, anyway). The problem is that when you transfer these payments from one account to another, you must automatically assign a Category of Transfer, which can make tracking payments by a general category such as Credit or Debit difficult. You can get around this dilemma by creating a class and then assigning that class to all the transactions in your check register that have been transferred to a credit card account. A class is a way to include additional information about each transaction, specifying where, what, and to whom individual transactions are applied.

To create a class:
1. In Quicken, choose Edit + Class.
2. Click the New button.
3. Enter a name and optional description.
4. Click OK.

To assign a class to a transaction:
1 In the account you want to record a transaction in, click in the Category field of the intended transaction.
2. Enter a category for the transaction. 3. Choose Lists + Class; then double-click the class name to automatically paste it in after the category. Alternatively, after you choose a Category of Transfer (scroll down the Category line in your account), type a slash (/) followed by the class name.

To create a report that displays all your transfers:
I. Choose Reports + Home + Cash Flow.
2. Click Customize.
3. Click the Include tab in the Customize Cash Flow Report dialog box.
4. Click Clear All and then manually select each of the Creditaccounts.
5. In the Matching section, enter the class name in the Class Contains box.
6- Click Create to generate the report.

Quicken creates a new cash flow report that lists only those transfer transactions.

TIP: ENTERING MULTIPLE TRANSACTIONS ACROSS ACCOUNT TYPES

In Quicken, you can create as many different accounts as you need, enabling you to easily keep track all your financial transactions. But all these accounts make entering transactions harder than it has to be because you first have to open the Register and then switch to the appropriate account to record a transaction. Wouldn't it be nice if you could record all your transactions from a single point, regardless of the account type? Well, Quicken's Financial Calendar enables you to d just that. The Financial Calendar lets you enter brand new transactions and view transactions that you've already made. Even better, you can enter multiple transactions, each of which may be assigned to a different account. No more switching back and forth between the accounts.

To enter data for every account from a single point:
1. In Quicken, choose Features + Reminders + Financial Calendar.
2. Double-chck the date of the transaction to create a Transaction box; then chck the New button.
3. In the New Transaction dialog box, indicate the account to use and specify the type of transaction.
4. Enter the remainder of the transaction information as requested.
5. Select Register Transaction if this is a single transaction and you don't need to be reminded of it. If it will become a regular transaction, select Scheduled Transaction and fill in the information about when to be reminded, etc.
6. Click OK.
7. Repeat Steps 2 through 6 for each transaction you want to create from every account you need to draw from.

TIP: AN ICON'S WORTH A THOUSAND CLICKS Quicken's Iconbar offers a quicker route to the commands and features than does the menubar, or even the Activity Bar for that matter. You can shave off even more time by adding the commands you use most frequently to the Iconbar. To do so, you simply create your own icons and then add them to the Iconbar.

To add an icon to the iconbar:
1. From the menubar, choose Edit + Options + Iconbar.
2. Click the New button.
3. From the Icon Action list, select the action you want to add to the bar. For instance, select Budget to add the Budget tool to your icon bar.
4. Click the Change button.
5. Select the graphic image you want to use for the icon.
6. Type the label to use for the icon in the Icon Label field.
7. Assign a speed key combination if you wish and click OK.
8. Click OK to add the icon to the iconbar.
9. Back at the Customize Iconbar dialog box, make sure the Show Icons option is selected and click Done.

If you can't find the icon you've just added to the iconbar, don't worry, you're not going loopy. Just click the little arrows located at the far left and right of the iconbar to cycle through the available icons.

TIP: DATA SNAPSHOTS--PART 1 OF 3
(In Quicken 98, not Quicken 99 which shows SNAPSHOTS on the HOME PAGE)

In Quicken, when you want to see where you stand financially you can always generate a report. But if all you are looking for is a quick overview of your financial footing, then Snapshots are the way to go. Snapshot reports show you, at a glance, summaries of your finances. You can view, for instance, your net worth, monthly income or expenses and a savings goal--all on a single page.

To generate these snapshot reports, choose Reports + Snapshots. The Snapshots page appears and displays four different graphs. The first two graphs, located in the upper portion of the page, show your monthly income and expenses. The next two graphs, shown in the bottom half of the page, display your net worth and a predetermined budget goal.

To display a full-screen view of a particular graph, point at the graph and then double-click the mouse button. A new graph page opens and shows your graph in full view. You can switch back to your snapshot page by selecting the Snapshot Quicktab or by closing the full page graph window you just opened.

In the following tips, we'll show you how to get the most out of this handy feature.

TIP: DATA SNAPSHOTS--PART 2 OF 3

In our last tip, we introduced the Snapshots feature, which shows you a quick summary of your finances. In this tip, we'll show you how to customize the Snapshots page to your liking. For instance, you can choose the graph types that you want on the Snapshots page. To generate the snapshots, choose Reports + Snapshots.

To customize a Snapshot:
1. Click the Customize button located in the upper left corner of the Snapshots page.
2. In the Choose the Snapshot to customize portion of the dialog box, located in the upper left corner, click the pane that contains the graph you want to change.
3. In the Snapshot Type section, choose the graph type you want to display. When you select a graph type, the area to the immediate right displays a description of the current graph type.
4. To display the data in graph form, select Graph from the Snapshot Display section. Select Text if you wish to display the data in text form.
5. If you want to further customize the graph, such as choosing the date range of the graph or selecting the accounts or categories to include, click the Customize Snapshot button. Make any changes as necessary and click Create.
6. Back at the Customize Snapshots dialog box, click OK. Quicken redraws the Snapshots page.

TIP: DATA SNAPSHOTS--PART 3 OF 3

The past two tips have discussed the Snapshots feature, which shows you at a glance the current state of your finances. Our last tip demonstrated how you can change the graphs used on the Snapshots page. In this tip we'll show you how to create additional pages on which you can add your own financial snapshots.

1. First, select Reports + Snapshots.
2. Click the Customize button located in the upper left pane of the Snapshots page.
3. Click the New button in the Snapshot Page section of the dialog box.
4. Enter a name for the page in the resulting dialog box and click OK.
5. Add the graph types you want to use in your snapshots, by clicking each relevant item in the Snapshot Type list.
6. Click OK when you have finished.

Back at the Snapshots screen, click the drop-down arrow in the Choose the Snapshot page field. Select the name of the page you just created to display that page.

TIP: A PROMPTER REPORT

When you create a report, do you very rarely customize the settings? If so, you can turn off the display of the Create Report screen altogether; this window appears by default whenever you create a report. To turn off the window, you must first generate a report or switch to a report you have already created.

To skip over the Create Report screen:
1. Choose Reports + Home + Cash Flow, or any other report type and click the Create button at the bottom of the Create Report screen. Or, click on the appropriate QuickTab to switch to an existing report.
2. Click the Options button located in the upper right corner of the report screen.
3. In the resulting Report Options dialog box, select the Skip Create Report Prompt box.
4. Click OK.

Now, the next time you create a report, Quicken will do just that, create a report. If you need to make any changes to the report's settings, click the Customize button located in the upper left corner of the report screen and make your changes as necessary.

TIP: MAKING A LIST, CHECKING IT TWICE--PART 3 OF 4

In the past two tips, we've shown you how to use the Financial Address Book to keep track of the individuals to whom you wish to send a holiday greeting. To recap, choose Lists + Track Important Addresses. Next, select Options + Set Up Group from the Address Book's menubar, to create a group named Holiday Cards; then assign that group name to the intended recipients. Finally, sort the records by choosing the Holiday Cards group from the Group dropdown list. Now that you've got your list of holiday card recipients, it's time to produce a printout of the names and addresses and keep it handy as you address your cards.

TIP: MAKING A LIST, CHECKING IT TWICE--PART 4 OF 4

TIP: PEEK AT YOUR FINANCIAL NEEDS WITH BILLMINDER You always want to keep up to date on the bills you have to pay and other financial due dates, but loading Quicken every morning to see what's on the day's financial bumer can be a pain in the you-know-what. Why not set the Billminder to display at startup so that you can decide whether you want to run Quicken at that moment? Billminder gives you a list of all your upcoming financial events.Then you decide whether you want to face your finances that day.

To activate the Billminder:

1. Choose Edit + Options + Reminders.
2. Click the Bilminder tab.
3. Select Show Billminder When Starting Windows.
4. Click OK.

The next time you start your PC and after Windows has loaded, the Bilminder appears, listing all your upcoming financial events. Click the Run button to start Quicken or click Exit to shut down the Bilminder.

TIP: CLASSIFYING YOUR DEBT One of the neat things about Quicken is that, while you can record payments made to your credit cards and watch your checking account balance decrease, you can also transfer these payments into the appropriate credit card account and watch the balance of your credit card debt decrease (hopefully, anyway). The problem is that when you transfer these payments from one account to another, you must automatically assign a Category of Transfer, which can make tracking payments by a general category such as Credit or Debit difficult. You can get around this dilemma by creating a class and then assigning that class to all the transactions in your check register that have been transferred to a credit card account. A class is a way to include additional information about each transaction, specifying where, what, and to whom individual transactions are applied.

To create a class:

1. In Quicken, choose Edit + Class.
2. Click the New button.
3. Enter a name and optional description.
4. Click OK.

To assign a class to a transaction:

1 In the account you want to record a transaction in, click in the Category field of the intended transaction.
2. Enter a category for the transaction.
3. Choose Lists + Class; then double-click the class name to automatically paste it in after the category. Alternatively, after you choose a Category of Transfer (scroll down the Category line in youraccount), type a slash (/) followed by the class name.

To create a report that displays all your transfers:

I. Choose Reports + Home + Cash Flow.
2. Click Customize.
3. Click the Include tab in the Customize Cash Flow Report dialog box.
4. Click Clear All and then manually select each of the Creditaccounts.
5. In the Matching section, enter the class name in the Class Contains box.
6- Click Create to generate the report.

Quicken creates a new cash flow report that lists only those transfer transactions.

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