[Tips]

Taking control of your Pocket Quicken file

I have been using Pocket Quicken (PQ) since the 200LX was released in August 1994 and have a pretty good system for interfacing the palmtop and desktop. I have stayed with Quicken for Windows 3.0 on my desktop since it does all I need and is still fully c ompatible with PQ files. Quicken for Windows 4.0 is the last version of Quicken to have this compatibility. I keep a full Quicken file on my desktop going back eight years or so. My palmtop gets ALL of my entries, but I only keep a three or four month mov ing "window" in its file. Once my filesize climbs to around 200K, I pare it down to the last three months of data and drop the file size to around 110K.

To merge in all my new transactions from palmtop to desktop, I remove my flash card and put it into my Win95 machine's SCM Swapbox. The flash card holds the latest backup copy of my PQ file, but I always keep the working file on the RAM disk for speed. W in95 recognizes the card as a hard disk and sets it up as the E: drive. I then run the HP Connectivity Pack's merge function to take the last two months of data directly from the flash card. I only take two months because there are balance forwards sittin g three months back in the palmtop file and they will throw the balance off. If you do not have a PCMCIA drive, transfer your PQ file to your desktop's hard drive and merge from there. Do not try to merge or synchronize over a cable connection as dat corr uption can occur.

The problem with trimming PQ files is: they don't decrease in size. They are supposed to re-use the new space created by the trim for new transactions, but I have not seen that in my use. The file just continues to grow.

Here is my procedure for paring down the file size:

  1. Run trim to remove everything before three months back.
  2. Make a new blank PQ file in C:\TEMP called XFER. (It's best to use the RAM disk versus a flash disk for the increased speed.)
  3. Export my checking account file to C:\TEMP to a file called TEMP sending all categories and accounts.
  4. Open XFER and import TEMP.
  5. From here I have macros that handle all the keystrokes for import/export. I go to my just-trimmed PQ file, cursor to the account to export and hit the export macro. When the macro ends, I'm in XFER. I cursor to the account to import into and hit the i mport macro.
  6. Finally, I run another macro several times to upgrade the last reconciled balances of several accounts in my new file.
  7. I now have two identical files, XFER and the original except the original is bloated and inefficient. It gets deleted, XFER is renamed and I'm done.
Here are the macros I use. They should be entered as one line in the macro application.