Quicken 2006 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Chapter 10. Reports and Graphs

• Running Reports

• A Quick Guide to Quicken Reports

• A Review of Report Preferences

• Printing Reports and Graphs

• Customizing Reports

• Saving a Report

Quicken comes with dozens of built-in reports and graphs that show what’s up (or down) with your personal finances. The only challenging aspect is figuring out which report tells you what you need to know and where you can find it. This chapter demystifies reports and the many ways of generating them.

If you’re new to Quicken or financial lingo in general, EasyAnswer reports were made for you, as explained in the box on Section 10.1. These reports tell you what they do in plain English—as in, “Did I meet my budget?” If none of the EasyAnswer reports meets your needs, the Reports & Graphs Center lists all of Quicken’s reports. This chapter describes some of the more popular built-in reports, what they’re good for, and where you can find them.

If you’re a Quicken veteran (or trying to become one), you can take those built-in reports and customize them to your needs: tweak a date range, remove unneeded columns, or add subtotals in different places. You can then launch that report straight from the Reports menu or the Reports & Graphs window. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to customize reports to get what you want and then save those reports for future use.

Tip

If none of Quicken’s customization tools does what you want, see Appendix B to learn how to export a Quicken report to another program for fancy formatting and ...