Cool MS Money 2005 trick

I was an avid Quicken devotee going all the way back to the old DOS version, but in an effort to be a "company man" I switched to MS Money when I joined Microsoft (which is going on 4 1/2 years now).  Say what you want about MS Money 2005, I haven't experienced the issues that many have reported, especially since I upgraded from 2004 (which is where I've read a lot of complaints).

Nonetheless, I finally got my act together and laid out a budget in the tool, the thing is when you're done setting up the budget you can only pick three categories you want to track closely - meaning those three appear as thermometers on the home page so you can gauge how your spending is tracking.  But what if you want to watch more than three?  I always thought previous version allowed you to do it, and it turns out someone else did too when they posted to the internal MS Money discussion list.  The functionality is still there, just not as obvious to get to:

From one of the devs on Money: “You can access the Money 2004-style interface for selecting favorite categories to watch by going to Tools|Alerts Center, selecting the “Customize your Advisor FYI alerts” link, and selecting the “Monthly Spending” tab. You can then select categories and have your spending tracked against your budget (if you have one) or against any arbitrary limit you wish.”

Not a trick that will directly put more money in you account, but may help you to keep what you have there better.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 13, 2005
  Thanks for the tip, I've been worndering about this.
  
  Now I don't have any excuse for not keeping track of the budget.
• Anonymous
  January 13, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  January 14, 2005
  I do have to say it is pretty obvious in their effort to dumb down the interface for the so-called "unwashed masses" the Money team buried a lot of the real power of this application.
  
  In their defense, I know that the bulk of people out there buying their first computer will list "track my finances" as on of the top reasons for the purchase, and a lot of effort has gone into simplifying the interface for those folks. I have no first hand knowledge of this, just a very educated guess knowing how most of our PG's work.
  
  I've always thought it a bit weird that the menu system across the top of money wasn't very useful for anything beyond closing the program, manually kicking off a backup, or setting some options.