People on the nets have been discussing updates to Quicken, the popular personal finance package recently, and Harry Hahn <hhahn@macc.wisc.edu> passed on a useful tip for finding out what version of Quicken you have. Quicken does not advertise new versions, so the only way to find out what version you have is to open the About Quicken dialog box and press the R key, after which the release number appears next to the version number. The last reported release is release 4, but some reports indicate that the only way to get it is to know the secret bug. What's the bug? Good question.

Most of the problems reported by Larry Wink <fdmwink@ucf1vm.cc.ucf.edu> were in the Investment portion of Quicken, and you can find out more about them by searching the macintosh-news.src source in WAIS with the phrase "Tell me about bugs in the Quicken Investment Manager as reported by Larry Wink." The first hit should be the Info-Mac Digest V11 #119. Of course, this is easiest done using WAIS for Mac or MacWAIS, both of which are available from <ftp.tidbits.com> in:

ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/mactcp/ wais/

Of course, the other way to do this is to email Intuit and ask for the update, a tack with which Bob Warner <71431.2567@compuserve.com> had excellent luck, receiving a update in email from Eric Tilenus <76450.3340@compuserve.com> of Intuit Marketing within a few hours. So maybe the online support, is, as is often the case, a more productive line of inquiry.

Email might especially help those of you outside of the U.S. Darren Challis <dchallis@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU> wrote to tell us that he tried to get an update from the Australian Intuit distributors, a firm called Reckon Software, and they eventually sent him the wrong version. When he called back and explained that he wanted the newest version, they said they couldn't help, since checking the version number requires a Mac and they didn't have one. Ouch.