I know someone at Intuit in Tucson and he had mentioned that there have been talks at Intuit about pursuing an 'Open Format Strategy', which I assume involves publishing their data formats. -jmz On 7/3/07, Vaughn Treude wrote: > > Hello: > For quite some time I've been wanting to move my company books form > QuickBooks to GnuCash or some other Linux application. I was having > difficulty finding a way to convert my existing data, but I > procrastinated. Recently something happened that convinced me to do it. > Sad story follows: > > I have a copy of QB Pro 99 I need to move to a newer Windoze computer, > yet when I installed it, it refused to read my data files, because they > were from a "newer" version. Huh? What I believe caused that is the > fact that I allowed Intuit to update my QB99 online. I've posted a > question to their forum. If their answer is "buy a new version", I > swear I'll never give Intuit another nickel. I did some searching and > discovered a product called DataBlox (a Windows product, at > datablox.com) which claims to be able to extract data from all QB > formats. It costs $99 and even if this is more expensive than buying a > new QB, at least I wouldn't be giving my money to Inuit. > > Does anyone know of any cheaper alternatives? I'm having trouble > locating "quickbooks hacks" because there are at least 100 programs out > there to recover lost QB passwords, which causes Google to return a lot > of noise. > > While googling I've also found a lot of examples of Intuit's obnoxious > business practices. The worst was requiring banks to pay extra to > support Quicken for Mac, which means that a lot of banks won't support > Mac users, even though THE FILE FORMAT USED IS IDENTICAL. It is an a > totally artificial crippling of the product. (BTW, the poster found a > workaround by configuring his copy of QB with a different bank's ID.) > Intuit is probably losing money doing this - unless MS is paying them > off to discourage the Mac - which I doubt, since MS makes most of its > money on Office, not the OS. > > Intuit is evil! > > Vaughn > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > -- .0000. communication. .0001. development. .0010. strategy. .0100. appeal. JOSHUA M. ZEIDNER IT Consultant ( 602 ) 490 8006 jjzeidner@gmail.com