Microsoft Money Premium 2005 [Old Version]
![Microsoft Money Premium 2005 [Old Version]](/Images/B0002D156I/medium.jpg) | Average Customer Rating: Recommend Money Premium 2005 is the ultimate personal finance solution that will help you secure your financial future. It automatically consolidates all your online bank and investment information and provides the tools and insights to help you optimize your investments, minimize tax implications, and reach long-term goals. Money Premium 2005 includes everything in Money Deluxe 2005.… Product details and pricing info |
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41 Customer Reviews Posted
- Almost but not quite.
- MS Money for Small Business 2005 has many great features. But unfortunately for a small business such as ours it does not do the trick. While you can import your Outlook contacts into Money, you cannot choose from which folder to import thereby eliminating any flexibility and requiring extensive editing. The big drawback is importing data unless it is in QIF format. If your business has extensive inventory, as does ours, there is no way to import it unless it is in .inv format. Doing a search on MS does not yield one reference to that format: we had hoped to be able to at least convert from Excel--our ideal would have been to convert from QuickBooks. So until MS addresses these critical (for us) needs we will unfortunately have to continue with QuickBooks.
- 2005-02-08, 7 of 8 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Don't upgrade
- I've been a MS Money customer since Money 99. I bought this as an upgrade for Money 2004.
Upgrading from Money 2004 was a nightmare. After "upgrading", I had difficulty connecting online to brokers such as Fidelity and Vanguard. This worked in Money 2004.
The new feature that is most obvious is the new user-interface, which dedicates most of the screen real-estate to ads, downloaded (slowly) from MS Moneycentral. In general, the program runs slower than Money 2004.
I haven't found any new feature in the new version that I'd consider useful, or an improvement from Money 2004. It's definitely a step backwards, in terms of reliability, speed, and usability.
I've completely removed this product from my system, and reverted to Money 2004. - 2005-02-08, 15 of 16 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Random crashes and Internet updates/download problems
- This is the worst Microsoft product I have ever used. I don't have much to add to what's been said already, but just to build a concensus ...
It crashes at least once every 10 minutes even with basic, light use - even after a clean Windows XP re-format/re-install up to service pack 2. Updates from many of my credit cards are either extremely slow, work very intermitently, or just don't work at all.
Amusingly, during online setup of my citibank card in Money 2005, the progress percentage kept incrementing and incrementing like it was doing something; yet CPU usage was neglible and there was no network traffic in sight for miles. Kinda like when you're using Internet Explorer and the little status bar on the bottom clearly shows little boxes being filled in ... you know ... like you're going somewhere or something important is happening, but no ... apparently microsoft is just toying with your emotions, because CABAM "Unable to do this or that" splashes up on the screen or worse yet a crash. But at least in Internet Explorer I don't have to enter my .Net password everytime I restart.
You're better off balancing your credit cards in Excel, well at least until Microsoft "upgrades" that ... - 2005-02-04, 15 of 16 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Works for me, although interface still not the best
- There appears to be a small army of people who, like the recalcitrant insurgents in Iraq, will do anything to destroy Microsoft's reputation. I'm not here to defend the biggest software company in the world. As with any company, it makes some great products, many good products, and some bad products.
I did not upgrade to Microsoft Money 2004 because, sometime in 2003, my Money file developed some kind of minor corruption ("This operation cannot be performed" error after entering certain types of transactions), and Money 2004 refused to even read the file. This time, I downloaded the trial version of Money 2005, and it loaded the old-format file without a hitch. And the mysterious error message is no more!
Money is cool because it makes it easy to keep track of your accounts, esp. for someone like me with dozens of banking and brokerage accounts (many from the days of Internet bubble when banks were giving away free money for opening accounts -- I knew I needed a real job...). It's generates useful reports to track your networth, by category or over time. Even for someone like me with lots of small accounts but little to show in the aggregate, it's immensely useful.
This Premium version has more investment and tax support. If you have a lot of investments, this is right for you as it saves you some stress. For those of us with mostly banking and credit card accounts to track, the "deluxe" version is cheaper and sufficient.
Should you get Money 2005, or upgrade from an earlier version?
I can't really help you with that question. But I do have a couple suggestions:
1) Download the 30-day trial copy of the program from Microsoft's website and give it a test drive. I tried it on my two laptops and both copies worked perfectly, which led me to doubt the truthfulness of a lof of these reviews from so-called "I'm not anti-Microsoft" people. (No, yours truly doesn't work for Microsoft or get paid by them in any way.)
2) For a peace of mind, make a manual backup copy of your existing Money file in Windows Explorer. Just go into My Computer or Windows Explorer, find the Money file (it's usually in "My Documents"; its extension is ".mny"), and use copy-and-paste to make a copy. Keep the backup copy in a different folder. Better yet, zip the backup copy for extra security. :)
Try the program and judge for yourself if it works fine on your PC. Not all the naysayers are liars, no doubt. But, as I always advice my friends when they ask about gadgets, movies and whatnot, always try it yourself and form your own opinions. - 2005-02-01, 12 of 18 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Money 2005 is Money Washed Down The Drain
- I have been a faithful user of Microsoft Money for years. Every year I would upgrade the software as it came out. This year was not an exception. However, once I installed Money 2005 all hell broke loose. I could no longer import my bank statments, the automatic updates ceased to function. The program crashed constantly. I called Microsoft about these issues and leared that they no longer supported the types of downloads from my bank and that my portfolio was no longer supported (So much for the claim of more banks being added to the list of supported institutions). As far as the problem with the program crashing, there was nothing Microsoft could do. The tec guy couldn't figure it out. So I sent the product back to Microsoft and went back to 2004.
- 2005-01-19, 11 of 13 people found this review helpful, Rated:
