Running Quicken on a Mac has been a frustrating experience. I’m a longtime Windows user and, in fact, started using Quicken back when it was an MS-DOS application. When I upgraded to Windows, I upgraded Quicken as well to run native under Windows.

Note for Quicken Mac 2015 users: If you purchased Quicken Mac 2015 from the App Store, your update procedure has changed. Updates are no longer distributed through the App Store. Visit the Quicken support page for information on how to update Quicken Mac 2015 without using the App Store. Instead, Quicken 2016 for Mac is a brand new product built from the ground up (starting in 2010) and is NOT a continuation from Quicken 2007 for Mac but rather from Quicken Essentials, so there are some features that still have NOT BEEN ADDED back or are not as fully developed yet.

Now that I use an Apple Macintosh, I still use. The reasons are the numerous drawbacks with Quicken Macintosh version: • Long Development Life Cycles: Only every 3–4 years does Quicken upgrade their software. • Missing Features: Compared to the Windows version it’s missing many features. • Buggy Software: As reported by many reviewers on Amazon, the native MacOS product is very buggy as well. Back in the old days of computing, the only viable way to run Windows was to get a dedicated machine to run the software.

Of course this can be costly and take up massive amounts of desktop space. Not only this, but it’s also impractical. Today you have the option to create a virtual machine within your Macintosh to run other operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows. So the advantages are less hardware to maintain and the ability to run software not natively available for Apple’s macOS.

There are two reasons why I do this: • There’s no other viable alternative application available for Mac. • Security is increased by virtualization. Increased Security by Virtualization Let me touch on the second reason in a little bit more detail. The added benefit of virtualizing your personal finance software is security. By keeping Quicken installed on its own copy of Windows (in fact also completely separate from macOS), it minimizes the chances of getting malware, viruses, and Trojans. This, of course, assumes you run nothing else on this virtual instance, nor do any tasks other than. This is critical.

It sandboxes your personal finance within a virtual machine that’s dedicated to no other tasks. All too often individuals unknowingly compromise their computer’s security by not updating software or by visiting websites with malware that can infect your computer. By limiting activities to only Quicken this decreases the chances for infection and therefore increases the security of your personal finances. Before You Begin Before you begin, make sure your Mac is pretty recent (no more than, say, 3–4 years old) and has at least 4 GB of ram and 30GB of available hard drive space. Otherwise, the machine will not have enough resources to run Windows and Quicken at the same time you wish to run other OS X native applications.

These steps apply not only to Quicken for Windows but really to any Windows-based program you wish to run on a Mac. Summary: Here’s How to Get Quicken for Windows To Run on a Macintosh • • • • • • Total time to perform these steps should be less than one hour.

Get Your Virtualization Software I personally recommend to run for your virtualization needs. VMware has a long history with virtualization, and you have the added benefit of being able to move your virtualization container to any other platform in which VMware runs. This means if you also have a desktop Windows machine running VMware, you can move your virtualization container and run it there as well. Is another option, but I don’t recommend it because it’s not as popular.

However, it does have similar functionality. Install Microsoft Windows Once you get VMware Fusion set up, you need a copy of Microsoft Windows.

VMware instances are like brand-new barebones machines — they need an operating system to function. Technically you need a legit license that is separate from any other computers you own. Get a copy of the, which is the version I recommend running. Alternatively, you can use Windows 7 or Windows 10, though there’s nothing in Quicken’s software that needs the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system. Page break view excel mac 2011. All operating systems are supported by Quicken.