Subtitles of the Movie

There are two other methods of customization that we can work with in Quicken, apart from our tool bars and our views. These consist of the Account bar and Overall Preferences. Our Account bar, of course, is the Accounts section that would appear on the left-hand side of the screen, and Preferences is the overall look and feel of the Quicken program. To get to these, we'll go to Edit, down to Preferences, or to Customize Account Bar. Let's start with Preferences. When I go over to the Quicken program this will ask me different preferences for the overall program and features such as start up. You'll notice that I can choose which exact Tab that I'd like to open to. Under those tabs I can actually go to a particular component. I can also choose my colors so if I'm not a fan of blue, I can go to green. This can also be very useful if you have more than one Quicken file on your machine. You'll also notice that items on your register, such as Quick Bill, Would you like to complete the fields using previous entries? Would you like to capitalize payees? These are different types of features that you can choose from. Notice in Writing Checks I can choose a four-digit year, or a two-digit year. I can allow entry of extra messages on checks. It is definitely worthwhile to take a few moments and visit these individual preferences. You will find that all of these components make your experience in Quicken much more personalized. Notice in our set up that we have a Backup area. It is important that you set this to remind yourselves automatically to do your backup. Now, I'm a fan of constantly doing backups, so I might not be happy with three times. I may choose for Quicken to remind me every time to do that backup. Also, when you do backup copies, it keeps writing the same program to the same disk. You may want to limit the number of backups on a disk so that you don't run the risk of having corrupted copies. You'll notice you can also warn yourself for overwriting them. We'll talk more in depth about how to do backups in an upcoming movie. At this point I'd like you to be aware of when things are uncomfortable for you, take a tour of these particular preferences. See if there's not an entry that will make life easier. When we're finished, we'll say OK and our changes will be applied on the screen. Now, if we go to Edit and go down to Customize the Account Bar, we'll be able to maneuver things in this account listing. Now, in particular, what becomes nice is we can change the order of these accounts. On the Account list, I start on the back with Personal, so I'm simply going to go down my scroll bar and you'll notice, under the Cash Flow accounts are the same ones I see on the screen. If I go into the Manage Accounts area and I select an individual account, you'll notice it allows me to move it up and down in the list so I can simply move my fashion to the bottom and notice in the background, as I move it, it's moving down right here also. I'll take my fashion card, move it down, and it's on the bottom of the list. Now, perhaps credit card 2 is not personal but is business; I'd like to move it from the Cash Flow down to Business. I'm going to go to the button that says Change Group. When I click on Change Group I'm now going to say that it is going to be a Credit account, but under Business. When I say OK, once again, it's removed it from my Cash Flow, but see how it's changed it to the Business area? This ability to actually change the Account list is wonderful. If I close out of the Account list, you'll notice that this allows me to adjust the Account bar to be comfortable for me. The minus, of course, allows me to close off individual areas so if all I'd like to do is focus on Business, I can. If all I'd like to see are just summaries of the information, I can. When I want to open it, I simply click on the plus. So, again, when I went to Edit I had the ability to change the preferences and I also had that ability to customize the account bar. Of course, earlier we talked about customizing the tool bar. Take advantage of these features and make sure that you set Quicken up for the best method possible for your data input.