Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Quicken

Quicken is far and away the most popular personal finance tool for the Mac. It’s been around for years and was one of the first native Mac OS X applications available. Since it was first released, it’s seen a number of updates, but it still retains the familiar look and feel that made it popular in the first place.

Create Customized Keyboard Shortcuts

Although Quicken has plenty of keyboard shortcuts, it might annoy you that it doesn’t have one for account reconciliation (Activities → Reconcile). Or it might bother you that

-L is assigned to Lists → Categories & Transfers instead of Lists → Loans.

If you’re using Quicken 2002 or newer, you can actually do something about your concerns, as these versions of Quicken allow you to create your own keyboard shortcuts easily. To create a new shortcut, or reassign an existing one, hold down the

key and pick the menu item you’d like to change. Quicken displays a small dialog box, as shown in Figure 13-10, which you can use to assign the shortcut key.

If you try to use a key that’s already assigned, Quicken will inform you that the key is already in use, and ask if you’d like to reassign it. You can even take over “system” shortcuts such as

-C for Copy,

-V for Paste, and so on. The only thing you can’t do is reassign a shortcut that uses ...