Over the past two weeks I’ve been making my final moves to the Mac. I’ve been running Boot Camp with a copy of Windows XP because I needed to run a few programs. The things I delayed moving to the Mac platform were:

• Quicken
• Legacy Family Tree
• Paperport
• Publisher (I was using this to do my parish’s bulletin which our new pastoral administrator will do now. No need for this app because I have iWork)
• Homescan

I had delayed in moving these because they had tons of data and take a bunch of work to get moved.

Quicken to Moneydance

The toughest was Quicken. The Mac version of Quicken is notoriously difficult and not everything transfers smoothly. In fact there are no programs out there that convert Quicken data easily or cleanly (i.e., don’t be fooled by anyone’s claims).

The other issue with Quicken is that the Mac version is way past its prime. They keep discussing a new version “coming soon” but I still think that they have not invested enough in their Mac line to make Intuit the software of choice.

In switching you just have to look at the scale of difficulty involved in all the available options and read a lot of reviews, hopefully locating the one that entails the least amount of pain. I chose Moneydance 2008. It took about two days to clean up all the transactions (note that they went back to 1993!!!) In the conversion there was limited duplication of entries. The biggest, most significant problem was with accounts where balances were brought forward from an archiving process in one account (like a checking account) and where the same transactions were not archived in the second account. To clean everything up I created a “Prior Transactions” account and moved the unmatched and duplicate transactions there. At the end I simply zeroed the Prior Transactions account balance. Not very elegant, but it worked. I just have to accept it as a one-off problem. Note too that I did not delete transactions because doing so makes the situation worse. If you have any accounting background think “T” accounts and having unmatched entries.

In the end I am finding Moneydance easier to use than Quicken. There is less in-the way and you get a clearer picture of your financial status. Quicken had simply evolved into bloatware. A lot of fancy bells and whistles that get in the way. Moneydance is simply clean, inexpensive, core Quicken – the Quicken I fell in love with years ago.

Legacy Family Tree to Reunion

Genealogy programs tend to transfer data easily. Gedcom files are the standard and most of the programs on the market, whether proprietary or freeware, export and import smoothly. No problem here. 2,535 individuals, 1,896 families all cleanly transferred.

The Reunion interface is much like the Legacy interface so it lends to a sense of familiarity. I like Reunion’s Mac look and feel. It also makes taking stuff to your local LDS Family History Center or National Archives Centers easier because it ports to your iPod.

Paperport to Yep!

This wasn’t a bad transition. I used Paperport for years, probably going back to version 9 or something earlier. Can’t quite recall. Anyway, I used it to store those all-too-important documents like explanations of medical benefits, bank statements, appliance manuals, etc. It helps to keep the paper down and I really dislike digging through old file folders.

In the newer version of Paperport those items are all stored in pdf format, but the older Paperport files are .max files. Paperport 11 has a batch converter so I changed all the .max files to pdfs. Yep! stores pdfs and is a the sort of application any blogger would love. It used tags to ID documents!!! It is great because you can get to documents through a tag cloud. You can also use as many tags as you like to describe a document. It allows new documents to be scanned in and is really easy to use.

On importing all my existing pdfs it automatically tagged them using the directory structure of the imported files (I simple copied over the “My Paperport Documents” folder and deleted all the extraneous files, i.e., those that were not pdfs).

Others

Publisher is gone – as I noted above I no longer need it. I’ll use iWork (even though I have Mac Office) for all my document publishing needs.

Homescan is the last holdout. They’ve been promising a Mac version of their apps. I hope that they hop on it. Mac users – let them know. Actually I would think that they would want to capture the Mac demographic.