Microsoft Money

What works

The program is very functional. The following worked as expected: 

• Importing QIF files
• Creating accounts
• Manually entering transactions
• Scheduled bill and deposit transactions
• Reports

What does not

• Online help (F1)
• Adding items to the shortcuts
• The My Money, Investing, Banking, Planning, Mortgages, Insurance and Student links in the horizontal menu all cause the program to crash. I suspect these are trying to connect to online services which no longer exist.
• I experienced some crashes trying to balance an account

Workarounds

Hang on closing

There is a bug in the program such that it does not always close cleanly and leaves a process hanging. The program cannot therefore be restarted until this process has been manually killed.

It is possible to mitigate this in by going to Tools > Settings > Backup options:

• setting to automatically backup to hard drive on exit
• set it to prompt for backup
• using the Alt+F4 key combination to close the application rather than the menu or close button
• selecting "Don't back up"

Most times this allows the process to exit cleanly. Clearly, you may want to use another backup strategy such as online backup, setting up a cron job, or manually backing up.

Calculator

In Money, one can press Ctrl+K to open the calculator but that tries to run the Windows calculator. If that's useful to you, you can run regedit in your wineprefix and edit HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Money\14.0\Calculator and set the value to your system's utility. For me, this is /usr/bin/gnome-calculator and this works.

What was not tested

I have not tested printing cheques or loan wizards and the like.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

I am using the UK version available for download at http://moneymvps.org/downloads/files/2005/Money2005-UK-QFE2.exe

My setup goes something like this:

1. set up environment variables for a new 32 bit prefix

   $ export WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine/prefixes/money

2. Use winecfg to create the prefix and set any necessary config (e.g. I need to set DPI to 192 for my laptop screen)

   $ winecfg

3. Winetricks to install the essentials:

   $ winetricks ie6 msxml6 corefonts

4. Apply the fix for the dropdown menu (bug 32589)

   $ regsvr32 /i browseui.dll

5. Install:

   wine Money2005-UK-QFE2.exe

6. Run:

   wine "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Money 2005\MnyCoreFiles\msmoney.exe"