OT: Cracking Quickbooks format

[Vaughn Treude]

fouldragon at aol.com wrote:
> You should see their online product.
> 
> My employer used it for a while for time-card submissions.
> 
> Windows-only.
> 
> IE only.
> 
> Download of a "Trust us, it's safe" ActiveX control required, with 
> instructions as to how to work around the fact that recent Windows 
> versions don't think it's too hot that you do that.
> 
> If you had a Mac, their suggestion was to buy Parallels or the 
> equivalent.
> 
> That's burying the chutzpah needle if you ask me.
> 
> Plus, the package sucked in the usability department.
> 

Yes, I've also seen a lot of negative comments about the regular 
product's usability.  I've gotten used to it, though.  But I sure 
wouldn't want to run my private financial info through somebody's web 
site, especially if I was forced to use IE.
Vaughn

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vaughn Treude <vltreude at deru.com>
> To: Main PLUG discussion list <plug-discuss at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
> Sent: Tue, 3 Jul 2007 12:31 pm
> Subject: OT: Cracking Quickbooks format
> 
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> 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
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