What Is Networking?
Jeff defined networking as the ability to hook computers together and share resources, including files, printers, and other peripheral devices. He said home networking has some of the same goals as networking in an office environment. Currently the biggest single driver for putting a network in your home is to be able to simultaneously share a single Internet connection with all of your (working) home computers. A home network allows you to send a report to your boss while another family member is using the connection to play an interactive Internet game.

When someone walks down the networking aisle at their favorite computer store, it doesn’t take long to see they have many different networking options. Although Jeff’s presentation was mainly about wireless home networking, he gave a review of some of the other home networking options.

Ethernet cable is what you find in many businesses today. The cables are similar to the telephone lines in your house, with a few additional wires. Ethernet is very fast—10 megabits/second to 100 megabits/second—with higher speeds on the horizon. Ethernet will work great in your home; however, Ethernet lines are not typically found in homes unless the homeowner makes a special effort to have them installed.

Using Home Power Lines
Another option for networking is using existing home power lines. Jeff cautioned against this method for computer networking. Although it is an inexpensive solution, power lines are noisy. You can get knocked off the network by a refrigerator motor or a hair dryer—not a good situation if that happens while attempting to download a big file. HomePlug Power Alliance is an organization developing standards for power line networking. They may finalize their standards sometime in 2002.

A third option is Home PNA (Phone Networking Alliance), using your telephone lines for networking. You can get good networking speeds between one and ten megabits per second. However, there are no PC cards on the market today for connecting a laptop.

Wireless gives you the ability to connect to your network from anywhere in your home, patio, garden, or garage. Although Proxim is also a manufacturer of Ethernet and phone line products, Jeff spent the remainder of the evening talking about Proxim’s wireless home networking technology.

Proxim’s marketing specialization is to offer products that are over one megabit per second in speed, easy to use, that allow you to share an Internet connection, be safe from virus attacks, and that support up to ten PCs in a network. Proxim’s wireless products use a language called Home RF to communicate with each other. Later in the presentation, Jeff discussed in detail the importance of making sure the wireless devices in your home are Home RF-compatible.

Proxim’s wireless products are called Symphony. The company manufactures adapters for PCs (and Macs) and devices that allow you to connect wirelessly to the Internet. They manufacture three adapters for PCs. You can purchase a PCI adapter and open up your computer to install it. You can buy a USB adapter if you have a USB port. Also, a PC card is available for a laptop that has an antenna built into it.

Proxim packages modem-sharing software with all of their devices. If you have a modem in one of your computers and want to share it with your other computers, Proxim provides the software to be able to do that.

However, if you do not want to leave that computer on all of the time, you have two options for stand-alone devices. The first one is a 56K dial-up wireless modem. You plug it into your power supply and your phone line. The second option, if you are fortunate enough to have DSL or cable modem service, is to get a cordless gateway that plugs into your DSL or cable modem.

Why Wireless Networking?
An obvious benefit to choosing a wireless solution for home networking is that no wires are needed. You do not need to bring cables into your home that may require you to punch holes in walls or floors. Power lines and phone lines are called "no new wire" solutions, but with them you need to have your hardware components physically connected. A wireless network will allow you to be mobile within your home. You can sit on the couch with your laptop and print a project to a desktop computer that is in another room.

Another advantage to a wireless network is that you get to keep your investment if you move to another home. If you run Ethernet cables through your home, you may need to leave them with the new owner.

The system is easy to install. After setting up hardware, the software requires as few as eleven clicks, mostly for the selection of default settings. Jeff demonstrated Proxim’s installation wizard, Composer. The wizard automatically detected the presence of a cordless modem and checked the connection. If the connection is not excellent, correction tips are provided. The wizard installed drivers for modem and fax programs and set up ISP settings. Hard drives available to be shared were shown on a map. Then available printers were displayed, followed by a status icon showing Internet connection status.

Naming the Computer on the Network
If a computer has never been networked before, you will also be asked for a computer name. The name could be something like "mom’s computer" or "kitchen"—something that makes sense to you. The name allows you to identify the computer separately from others on the network. You do not have to worry about TCP/IP, domains, DNS, or any other technical issues typically associated with a Windows network. All of these settings are handled by the wizard.

After the software was installed, Jeff brought up a status panel showing devices on the network and the modem status. Most of the information needed for connection to the Internet is downloaded from your ISP. You just provide Symphony with a user name and a password. Then provide a phone number to dial. If you are on a DSL or cable modem, you do not even need to do that.

A connection can be made by requesting the software to dial, or by opening the browser. Jeff connected to the SPCUG Web site over a local 56K connection using a wireless modem that was about 12 feet away from his laptop.

Proxim specifies that their home networking solution will cover about 150 feet indoors. That will allow networking a typical 2,000 to 3,000 square foot home. Jeff said he was being conservative at 150 feet. Through open air, the system will cover about 300 feet. However, in your home the signal needs to go through walls, ceilings, and floors. You typically can go through two or three obstacles before you start to lose the strength of the signal.

Jeff got into specifics when he was asked what happens when two neighbors each purchase a Symphony home network. Each network has a password, referred to as a security ID. The chances of both neighbors selecting the same security ID are low. You can have 15 simultaneous networks, of ten computers each (maximum), in the same physical area and they will never bump into each other as long as they have different security IDs.

The Proxim network is a frequency-hopping spread spectrum system that operates at 2.4 gigahertz. Most cordless phones operate at 900 megahertz, with some of the newer cordless phones now at 2.4 gigahertz. Spread spectrum radio means that the power generated out of the antenna is spread out over the airspace that the device is allowed to operate in. Frequency-hopping means that the signal does not sit at one frequency. Cordless phones that operate at 900 megahertz stay at one frequency, making it easy for someone to intercept the signal. You may have experienced how great your first cordless phone was, until your neighbor got one and you could hear their conversations on it.

Frequency-Hopping Technology
Frequency-hopping technology was developed for military purposes to provide secure transmissions between vehicles. By hopping, even if you do run into a something that looks like noise, the system will jump off it within a third of a second. The result is a very reliable wireless network.

Symphony’s design is based on 2.4 GHz technology that has been proven to be reliable over a number of years. Symphony gets you above the noise from all of the devices at 900 MHz, including cordless phones, garage door openers, and baby monitors. Plus it gets you the speed you need to share the fast Internet connections that you get with DSL or cable modems.

Symphony has hardware and software firewalls to guard against the vulnerabilities computer users face from viruses and hackers. If someone tries to access information on a wireless network, it will respond as if no information was present. Although that is usually enough to stop someone, the safeguards are much more sophisticated. Jeff did not identify all of the safeguards in place, but he did say there is no way that someone can hack into your network. The firewalls do not require any special settings, are working all of the time, and are transparent to the user.

Symphony is designed for mobility. Because of its very low power consumption, it can be used with handheld devices in applications that require continuous functioning all day. Stock markets also use Proxim’s technology to transact billions of dollars in trades each day. Symphony is designed to be moved between multiple environments. You can switch between the desktop, mobile, and office use without having to reconfigure networking settings. All of the changes between environments are handled by the software.

Doctors Without Wires
Proxim’s technology has been widely deployed in medical centers. Doctors can use wireless handheld devices to enter prescriptions and update charts. Since no transcribing is needed, the patient’s records are instantly available, and can be retrieved by another doctor if a patient is transferred to another part of the hospital.

Airports are also users of wireless technology. Proxim’s equipment has been on two space shuttle missions and will be used on Space Station Alpha. The equipment allows the astronauts to communicate with each other and with the on-board computer, which then uses a microwave link to Earth. Jeff pointed out that without wireless technology, the astronauts would have problems dragging all of the cables behind them.

Although there are many different configurations for networks, Jeff listed some of the basic products you will need. For every desktop computer you need either a PCI card or a USB adapter. Every laptop needs a cordless PC card. For an analog Internet connection you could use software you already have, or Proxim’s software, to share an existing modem, or you could use a cordless modem. If you have a broadband connection, like an ISDN router, DSL modem, or cable modem, or if you have a small office environment that already has Ethernet, and you need to add wireless mobility to a couple of computers, you could attached a gateway to an Ethernet hub and it would give you the ability to have wired and wireless users in the same network.

Jeff also spoke about the future of wireless and then mentioned a few more exotic uses for the technology. First, wireless communication is getting faster. Currently at 1.5 megabits per second, the FCC has given Proxim permission to increase their speeds to 10 megabits per second. You can have speeds approaching Ethernet capabilities of 100 megabits per second, but the technology is expensive. At about $25,000, the highest wireless speeds are usually cost-effective only for ISPs and other large data movers.

You will soon be able to use wireless technology at home, the office, at a convention center, an airport, or wherever else you need it. Starbucks is teaming up with Microsoft and MobileStar to provide wireless Internet access in 700 of their coffee shops. Hotels are working to get wireless Internet access available in their rooms, by the pools, and in the restaurants.

Although the current big push for wireless technology is based on wanting to share an Internet connection, Jeff predicted that the availability of voice services through your DSL or cable modem will increase the demand for wireless. Today, Pacific Bell or Roseville Communications probably provide your local telephone service. However, long distances companies like AT&T, MCI Worldcom, and Sprint are now testing, and will make widely available in 2002, local telephone service through your DSL or cable modem. Jeff recommended that beginning this summer, if you buy a cordless telephone, be sure it is 2.4 GHz and has a Home RF logo on it. That will insure you can unplug the phone from the wall and have it work through your DSL or cable service.

Motorola, the largest manufacturer of cable modems, is starting to place built-in antennas in their cable boxes. With a Home RF-compliant antenna coming out of the back of your cable modem, all you need to have a wireless network in your home is to buy an adapter for each of your computers. Netopia is producing DSL modems that are Home RF-ready.

(Proxim and Netopia announced a merger of the companies in late January. Several days after our March meeting, the two companies announced that, due to market conditions, they had mutually agreed to terminate their merger agreement. They plan to work closely together as strategic partners.)

Jeff gave some examples of what you can do with a wireless home gateway. The box would allow all of your connections to come into one central point and each connection would be able to communicate with each other connection. You would have a built-in firewall capability and be able to connect to the Internet with a mix of wired and wireless devices. The gateway could be connected to your DSL or cable modem. Jeff called the home gateway the Swiss Army knife of networking devices.

Another advantage to the home gateway is that you do not need separate Internet addresses for each device sharing the Internet connection. Jeff said that if you are currently paying $5-$20 per month for extra IP addresses, you could eliminate that extra cost by purchasing a home gateway.

Handheld devices are being developed by Siemens and lntel that will give you access to wireless information from the Internet and that will allow you to control systems in your home. Rather than going to your computer to participate with enhanced Web TV, you could use your wireless handheld device. These devices will also be great for waiters and waitresses. Your order could be sent directly to the kitchen.

A more exotic use for wireless technology includes the ability to have a personal robot in your home. Jeff showed a slide of the iRobot LE. It is available today. It not only walks around your house, it can be completely controlled wirelessly from anywhere in the world using an Internet browser. It will actually show you a Web page with a camera view, which is in the head of the robot. You can move the robot around. You can tilt its head. It has 15 sensors that keep it from bumping into other objects and furniture. It has the ability to climb and descend stairs. It is available to you, today, for only $5,000.

All of the products that Jeff mentioned in his presentation are either shipping today or are announced for shipping this year and are based on the Home RF standard. Home RF was created to move data and voice within your house or small office. Jeff said that if you get devices that have the Home RF logo, they are guaranteed to work together.

A wide variety of Home RF products are on the market now or are coming soon. You will be able to send your favorite Internet audio station wirelessly to a Home RF-compatible surround sound stereo, instead of getting poor quality from your PC speakers. Home RF alarm clocks will let you store the first part of the morning news wirelessly on your hard disk so you can hear the news from the top of the hour when you do wake up.

Most Symphony products work on Mac and Windows PCs. Mac drivers will soon be available on the Proxim Website. If you have a Powerbook G3 or G4, you can add it to your Symphony network and have Mac and Windows PCs operating on the same network.

Mac owners may be familiar with a company called Farallon, a Proxim company. When you access the Web site, you can get a toll-free telephone number for "Ask Dr. Farallon." Regardless of whether you own Proxim products or not, this service will help you select the right networking products for your computer. Symphony may or may not fit the application you have in your home. They will tell you what you need to buy, even if it is not their own products.

The Proxim Web site will also assist with selecting products for your network. After answering a few questions, a shopping list will be generated of products that you will need to buy. If you provide your zip code, the ten closest stores will be displayed. The site also provides the latest drivers.

At this point, Jeff opened up the presentation to questions from the audience. The first question was whether AOL and CompuServe could be used for the Internet connection. Jeff said that if you use AOL 4.0 or later, you have a chance of having a home network. Not all companies that provide Internet access are Internet Service Providers. They may just be providing a gateway out to the Internet. AOL has been a proprietary service, and they are just starting to become a true ISP. With AOL 4.0 and 5.0, you have the capability of dialing a standard Internet connection. To verify this, open the status panel. If it says TCP/IP, then multiple computers can share the connection on a network. If the panel says AOL or P3, then you are dialing into a location that does not support a standard Internet connection. A number of other Internet access companies use a proprietary dialer and do not allow you to share the Internet connection. These include CompuServe (2000 and Gold), NetZero, and Excite.

Jeff was asked if Proxim provides a way to communicate wirelessly through the Internet to change the temperature in your home (without training the iRobot to do it). Jeff said that home vacation monitoring was not something that Proxim specialized in. He recommended a company like X10, which specializes in devices to remotely control light switches, radios, and other aspects of the home environment from your PC.

One participant asked if wireless networking would be the only way to get access to voice services when they become available through DSL or cable modems. Jeff confirmed that other options would be available. When voice services are available, there will be a new DSL or cable modem box with a phone jack on the back. You would be able to plug a cordless phone base station into the phone jack.

In response to another question, Jeff said that on some cable or DSL services, you must either register your network card, or register your computer with a special name. The Proxim gateway, on the setup screen, has tabs to turn on or turn off that capability. For example, there is an @home check box, and when you click that you can specify a computer name. Each Proxim device has a specific address on it so you can just type in the one they provide. The DSL and cable services use these registrations to keep you from illegally sharing your connection with your neighbor.

The audience was interested in the technology used for business installations. Once you have a site larger than 2,000 to 3,000 square feet, you fit into Proxim’s business class. Business class allows you to wirelessly connect many sites up to seven miles apart. Obviously, that technology costs a lot more money. Repeaters do not connect the sites. Instead of having a cordless phone type of system, you create wireless cells of coverage similar to cellular networks.

The audience also asked about interference between 2.4 GHz cordless phones and Proxim’s 2.4 GHz network.

All cordless phones at 2.4 GHz are frequency-hopping devices. They bounce around while your wireless network is bouncing around. When the two systems bump into each other—and they will occasionally—it is for less than a third of a second. However, mathematically, through different combinations that you can have, Proxim can guarantee you can have 15 separate systems, including your phone systems, and not bump into each other. Your cordless system might interfere with your wireless system, but only if the antennas are too close together. Moving the antennas apart will solve that problem.

How much is it? The hardware for one desktop connection (PCI or USB) is $99 retail. A PC card for a laptop costs $129. A stand-alone gateway lists for $199. Jeff mentioned he has special user group prices. Jeff did not bring his user group price sheets, but will get a copy to Ken. Jeff said that user group prices will beat any store price.

Jeff also highlighted a special offer available through the end of June. If you purchase a Netopia router for your DSL or cable modem service, and you want to be able to hook up multiple wired computers as well as wireless, then if you buy those components as a package deal, Proxim will give you $70 back.

The final point that Jeff made was that Linux drivers available on Proxim’s Website.

At the conclusion of the presentation Jeff awarded a door prize of a Symphony Suite for the wireless networking of two computers to a lucky member of the audience.
Proxim, Inc. (PROX)
510 Deguigne Drive
Sunnyvale CA 94086
Phone: (408) 731-2700
Fax: (408) 731-3670

Quicken 2001
Matt McCann was gratified when a survey of the audience showed a substantial majority using Quicken to handle their finances.

Quicken is software that you install on your computer to track your personal finances, he said. "Now, we all have checkbooks I would guess, and when we go to the store and write out a check we go to the back of the checkbook and open up the register and write down the date, the check number, and who we wrote the check to and for how much. Then we do the math to see how much we should have left in the checking account."

In its most basic format that is what Quicken is. It is an electronic checkbook register. You tell it when you spend money, who you spend it with, and Quicken allows you to track what it was that you bought.

Quicken uses categories, so you can tell it when you buy computer equipment or clothing, when you pay for dining, rent, or utilities, or those types of things. Then you use the information at this time of the year to do your income taxes.

You can either print out the reports to give to your tax person to do the work for you, or you can use Turbo Tax, which Intuit also makes, that will read the data and do your income tax return that way.

When you install Quicken, it comes on a CD; you put it in your computer and it starts installation. It looks off to your hard drive to see if there is an old version of Quicken there or not. If it finds an old version it says, "Hey, we found this. Do you want us to uninstall this, Yes or No?" If you say "yes," we uninstall the old version of Quicken but your data file stays there. When you double-click on the icon to the far right that says "Quicken 2001 Deluxe," it will convert that data file over to the new format. If you have never used Quicken before and you double-click, it will take you to a window that says, "We want to start tracking your finances" and what do you want to call your data file?"

After that data file is created, we start creating the accounts you will use in Quicken. Normally the first one we work with is the checking account. You create the checking account by telling us the bank name and what you want to call it for your reference. A lot of the banks we work with offer online banking where you can download your transactions directly into Quicken, as well as do online bill payment now. When you do a transaction in Quicken you can mark it as an online transaction, and when you connect with the bank it authorizes making those payments.

"After you have created your checking account, you may create a new account. Maybe it’s another checking account, maybe it’s credit cards. I use credit card accounts just like I use checking accounts," Matt said. "Every time I use a credit card to buy something I go into the credit card account and enter the transaction so that I can always track and see how much I owe this credit card. That keeps me up to date and when I get the statement from the credit card company I can reconcile it. Then when I make a payment, it is just one transaction from the checking account to the credit card company and the category is the credit card account, thus reducing how much I owe it."

After you use Quicken for a while, it will take you to a window when you start up called "My Finances." The idea is to give you a quick snapshot of where your money is. Matt noted he had his accounts listed "so I can see, just as though I were to open up my checkbook register, how much money is in that account." As long as the transactions are the same between that register and Quicken, the numbers should be the same. The display also showed another checking account, a credit card account, a home and a car. "What are they worth? I have some loans for the home and the car. How much do I owe on those? I have some investments so it lets me see that."

The program showed some alerts, along with an income and expense graph. This window can also be customized to show things that are important to you.

Down the right side of the screen is Quicken’s quick launch area. It keeps a history of what you have opened in the past. So you can access your checking account or your frequent flyer card from multiple areas. It remembers the last windows that you were in.

In a larger font are Reports, Planning, Tax, Household, Investing, and Banking; these are centers just like the "My Finances" page. But the information that you find on those centers relates only to that topic.

If you open up Banking, the very first option is the Banking Center. The Banking Center is all information related to banking, "and I have alerts set up. These are things that my paper checkbook can’t do for me. Some of the alerts that I have are back in Iowa, where I live; we have a savings account.

"The savings account has only one job and that is to have enough money in it so that each month when the house payment is due that payment is automatically taken out of that savings account. We don’t have to do anything with it, but I want to be notified when that balance gets below a certain level so that I can transfer money into that account. If I don't, then there isn’t enough to make the payment and they will charge me $15 for a late fee.

"I can also have alerts to notify me if I ever get too much money in an account. That has never happened yet but it could, and then I would want to move that money someplace else where it will earn more interest than the 2% my checking account is paying.

"I have my accounts listed there as well. I can access those by just clicking on the name if I want to. Then I have my bills and scheduled transactions at the bottom. Scheduled transactions are those transactions that happen on a regular basis, like my car payment and my house payment. I can set it up so that Quicken will either notify me of them or do them automatically.

"What is different in Quicken 2001 is that Quicken will go through my different checkbook registers and my credit card registers, and bring up things that I have been paying on a regular basis but that are not a scheduled transaction. It can remind me when my cable bill is due, my water bill is due, my computer club dues are due, and when my insurance is due. It is not just limited to those things I have told it. It will remind me of other things as well.

Audience: Can you do bills and scheduled transactions for just one specific account or all of them?
They are for all accounts. You will see. Some of these say Anytown Checking, some say Credit Card. It will scan through all of my different registers to look for information for that. It looks across the board.

The Investment Center we have changed a lot, too. The information we are going to be seeing here is related to investing. You will see that I have my alerts for the companies I have an interest in whether I own them or not. I have my asset allocation guides. Asset Allocation Guide lets me walk through and see how I should be invested in these different areas: large cap stocks, international stocks, based on my level of risk. I have my mini portfolio down here so I’ve created accounts for my different investments. For instance, my Charles Schwab account, my Ameritrade account, a Merrill Lynch account—any account or business I have created that buys stocks on my behalf, I create accounts for it. I could have two or three Charles Schwab accounts. I could have one for myself, one for my wife, and maybe we have a joint account. I can track all three of those with three separate accounts. I have my "watch list" of stocks, companies that I either own or want to track here as well.

Audience: Can it handle puts and calls?
It can be done but it is not real easy. You have to do a lot of that information in the transaction itself. It’s done mainly with the memo notations.

Now I will go into my portfolio. We are going to spend just a second so that you can see what is going on because it can be a lot to look at right away. When I come into it each day, I click on "update" there at the top and I say "get online quotes." Using my Internet connection, it is going online and downloading the stock prices for my securities. I have 39 or 40 in here, something like that.

The information comes from a place called the S&P Comstock. They provide the information that we download. This is free once you get Quicken. We don’t charge you any extra for this. Once it’s done it updates the information in Quicken.

If I take a look at "Portfolio Value," then the information that I am going to see here is the market value, the cost basis. The information would be for the Charles Schwab account as a whole, and then each of the investments within it. It gives me the ability to see how America Online has done, what my pretax gain or loss is, and my percent gain or loss, as well as those figures for the whole account.

If I change my view to be "Portfolio Performance" the information that I see is "Return on Investment": one-year, three-year, and five-year. I can even customize these views to include or exclude different types of things that I want to see, based on date range or even what securities I want it to track for me. I also have the ability to create and customize and add my own views.

Audience: Once you have created these accounts, can you combine them? In other words I have set up a lot of accounts. I have been using Quicken for about 10 years now and some of these accounts have changed, stocks have changed and I’ve got some dead things in there that I can’t get rid of.
The question is about combining investment accounts. It depends entirely on what happened to them. If you have an old account, say with Charles Schwab, and you’ve stopped their service and you’ve transferred all of those holdings to another company, then you can transfer the initial transaction and move some of that information over. If it is an old account and everything is still alive, that account is still alive. So it really depends on how the accounts are set up and what their activity is today.

Audience: You can’t combine accounts like you can in QuickBooks?
In QuickBooks they just delivered the combining of accounts in their last version. I imagine it will come out in the next version of Quicken. But I haven’t seen it yet.

In the past few years, when you updated your stock prices in Quicken, you also had the ability to update and download any news headlines for your company. The problem with that in the previous versions is that we made it difficult for you to get that data.

Previously I would have to click on my America Online. At the bottom would be a tab called "News," and I would click on that, and then—one company at a time—it would list all of the headlines for that company. Some companies wouldn’t have any headlines. So it made it a lot of work.

Now what happens is as soon as I update my stock prices I can see which of my companies have headlines and which ones haven’t. We added this newspaper icon. If I move my mouse over it, it shows me the headlines—in this case for America Online—and I can click on any of these articles if I want. Quicken will then connect to the Internet. The red icon that we see up here, with the exclamation mark, is my alerts.

So if I put that up it will tell me things like 3Com had earning announcements today and if I want I can slide up and go see that through the Internet too. Biogen: price dropped 5% today. If I scroll down further I have Lucent and Microsoft with alerts, and I can see those things as well. We have added a couple of new icons to this list. I don’t see any of them here today, but one of them is a red arrow pointing down with an "L" in it. If you ever see this after you update your stock prices, that tells you that company has just hit a 52-week low. If you ever see a green arrow that points up with an "H" in it, call me. It is supposed to indicate a 52-week high. We even called Intuit to see to make sure that they put that icon in the software and they assured me that they had, it was just my investing is why I was not seeing it.

Because of that we have added a new column that you can track as well, called the 52-week range. We show the 52-week high and low for your securities from here as well. We also now track industry. When I update my stock prices Quicken will also tell me what industry that security is in. It will show me the industry percent change. I have the percent change for my security as well, so I can see all of my networking together, all of my application software together, and see how they compare to the rest of their industry. It gives me a new tracking and information tool.

If I go into my detail view, in this case for AOL, what I see here is all of the information for America Online. If I have ever bought or sold any shares of stock that information shows up here in the transaction history.

Here I am telling it that I bought or sold certain shares of this stock. Then we calculate the number of shares that you have, the market value, your cost basis, your gain or your loss, your percent gain or loss. Then the quote detail down below shows the change, the 52-week high or low, the volume of shares traded, the average volume, and so forth.

In this section of the window we have our price history graph. You can go back and download five years of data so that you can see this type of information. What was missing in this before was the ability to get stock splits for your company. Now you can. When you do your update of historical pricing it will also retrieve any stock splits. If you don’t have them already entered in Quicken, it will open a prompt window that will say, "You don’t already have these splits. Do you want to put them in now?" and it will put in the split information for you. This tool that adjusts for splits actually works and does something for you now that you can use.

In the register is where we can buy or sell, and tell Quicken to track these sales of stock. I do it from the "easy action" button on the upper left. Here I tell it I am going to buy or add shares of stock. If I am going to buy I tell it what security I am going to buy and I pick it from the list or I add it. Then I tell it where the money is coming from. Is it coming from another bank linked to this, from the cash balance of this account, and here I want to say just deposit the shares in the account without affecting any cash balance.

The reason for this is to help people like my dad stay out of trouble. He installed Quicken and he wanted to put in all of his stock information. That is all he is tracking. Then he called me to say "How come I have a negative balance of $150,000 in the account?" The reason is he is saying take the cash balance from this account to buy the shares, so it reduces it by whatever he bought.

For historical (non-current) transactions, just deposit the shares so it doesn’t affect cash balances for your reports and so forth. When you do that you tell it number of shares, price per share, date, and commission fees. If you are selling, enter the same type of information. Is it an income event, a dividend, interest income, capital gains? You can do all of that as well as your stock splits, your employee stock options, and all those types of things.

Under "advanced" you will find the tools to do acquisitions, stock for stock, spin-offs, and name changes. We make it pretty easy for you to enter the transactions you need.

Audience: Most of the securities have at least three months out there that can be downloaded. Are you going to make it simpler so you can do all of your accounts? Now you have to go to each individual account separately. At least I find I have to download each set of transactions for each fund or whatever you are using, instead of the whole fund in one group.
Are you talking about when you are not just updating the stock prices but are updating a Schwab account or whatever?

Audience: Right, or Vanguard.
If it is a particular account, it can be done all in one place at one time, but it still needs to connect to one, log out, connect to the other, log out, and so forth.

In that case, you are saying you have three accounts with Schwab. The first time it connects it uses one account name and one PIN number to connect and download those transactions. When that is complete, you need to connect to Schwab again and use this other account. Then you don’t run the risk of having the accounts getting mismatched.

Audience: But if you go into something like Vanguard where you have all of your mutual funds together you still have to go each mutual fund separately. You can see them all, but you have to click on each one to download the transactions.
Audience: Vanguard isn’t set up like Fidelity is, where Fidelity will dump all of your mutual funds, brokerage accounts, and everything into view. Schwab will dump it, Fidelity will dump it, but with Vanguard you have to save it out into quick format and import it in.
That will change as more and more get in. It is a different way to do things, as well. You run into that not just with those, but with different credit card accounts. Some go directly to the information, but with others I have to log into their website and download the information. It just depends on what level of support they have arranged with Quicken as far as what they are going to offer their customers. It varies from place to place.

Audience: I would need to be able to go to each one of my stocks and be able to read the puts, calls, and the options. I do that every day. Can I go directly from here to Yahoo?
We team up with Quicken.com. So you can go to Quicken.com and get more information, but not so much the options and calls because those are transactions you are going to put in. Say you are going to buy so many options or futures of a stock for April transactions. Those are transactions. You have got to see what the prices are. They handle it a little bit but it isn’t that great for the puts and calls.

The Household Center has been changed a lot over the last couple of years, mainly in how we handle certain assets, particularly houses and cars. Before they were no different than a Barbie collection. They were just something that we owned. In Quicken 2001, the first time you set this up it will walk you through it. If you tell us the asset is a vehicle, we will track it as a vehicle. You tell us the description, the make, the model, the year, and the odometer reading.

If you enable "Download Values Monthly," then once a month when you update your stock prices and other information, we will connect to a website called Edmonds.com and download the estimated market price of your car directly into Quicken. You don’t have to update that manually any more—not that you ever did it. I didn’t. For seven years we had a van worth $27,000.

The same thing is true with your house. You tell us the street address, the city, the state, the zip, and the square footage. Then you can connect to the Internet through a website called HomeRadar.com. It will download the estimated market price of your home based on property that has sold within the last six months within a half- mile radius of your home. It will show you the street address, the sales price, the date, and the square footage. Now I had a guy at a group meeting a while back ask, "Can I put in whatever address I want?" I told him, "Yes, within reason you can." The Home Radar folks right now cover about 60% of the country.

Where I live in Iowa, we just got the Internet a few weeks ago, so that information isn’t there. But if you are looking to move to another part of town or another part of the state in a metropolitan area, it works great. I said, "Are you looking to move?" He said, "No." I said, "What do you want to do it for then?" He said, "My kids just bought a new home and they are not telling me what they paid for it and I was hoping that this would do it for me."

The Tax Center
Tax Center is not TurboTax. The Tax Center is a place that you use throughout the year to plan for your income tax return so you’re not surprised this time of year when you do your taxes. Essentially, when you set up your categories, you can specify if the spending or income is tax-related. If it is tax-related, what form or schedule it is associated with. As you enter transactions throughout the year, you can open this window and see your tax-related income for the year and your tax-related expenses for the year. You tell us your filing status and other details, and every time you spend or receive money it will calculate an approximate tax due or refund due.

There are other tools in here: capital gains estimator, tax deduction finder, and so forth that you can use throughout the year to help you plan for that as well.

The Planning Center
The Planning Center includes a lot of things, too; budgeting is one. The biggest thing is the retirement planner. You can plan to make sure you are on track to meet your retirement goals. It is a continual process to make sure that as my spending changes and as my income changes I stay on track to maintain that goal.

Another great tool is the College Education Planner, where you can create and maintain college education plans for your kids or grandkids. We have two kids at home, and we had to set these up to make sure if our kids ever decided to go to college there would be money set aside for them.

The Report Center
The Report Center is where we get information back out of Quicken. I realize we haven’t done any transactions yet, and transactions are really the easiest thing, as you will see when we get towards the end.

I spend a lot of time in the Easy Answer Reports. This one is "Where did I spend my money during the period?" What we are going to do is answer these questions. "Where did I spend my money during the period" is based on time: all of the dates, the current month, current quarter, current year, month to date, quarter to date, year to date, earliest date, last month, last quarter, last year, last 12 months. You can even go in and customize those.

The report shows all of the money coming in and all the money going out for that quarter. If I want to see the graph, it shows me the bar chart across the top, money coming in or money going out for that quarter, with my pie chart down below. While this is a big bucket of money, all this bucket contains is $23,676.90, with each of these little slivers of colors being different dollar amounts. The bigger one here is auto, and it is 3.553% of the $23,676.90. I have no idea what that is, so I move my mouse cursor over that piece of the pie and it will tell me that it is auto and is $841.25. If I then double-click on it, I have my auto expenses for that quarter: October, November, and December. October is $169.50, November is $87.60 and December is the largest at $584.15.

Why is that so high? If I double-click on that piece, I see only the transactions in December that were used that add up to that $584.15. The very first one is auto insurance of $496. If I double-click on it now, I am inside the register at the transaction that was used to create that. The idea behind this is if you see big numbers that don’t make sense, double-click on them and we will make those big numbers smaller for you so hopefully they will make more sense.

The "How Much Did I Spend On" report covers the same time period, but what we are looking at now is our category. How much did I spend on rent, on insurance, on dining, on computer equipment, for the same time periods?

Last year I got a letter from the town that we live in. The letter said, "Dear Matt: It looks as if your water meter has been acting up. Give us a call and we will send a guy out to take a look at it."

The guy showed up, took a look, and he took out the old water meter and put in a brand new one. He ran a wire to the outside and put a new meter on the outside.

The next letter from the town said, "Dear Matt: When we got your meter back to the shop, it looks like it has been broken for a while. Thus, you owe us for l07, 900 gallons of water. We realize that this is a large sum of money so we will take monthly payments until you have paid off the $739 water bill."

I had my Quicken there and I pulled up the report and I did "Utilities." We have subcategories. So when I do "Show the Report" it showed me every transaction where we had paid the city for water since Jan. 1, 1996. I could then do comparison reports from one year to the next. I could see when our bill went down, when they were charging us the minimum. I could see it plain as day then.

So I did some calculations from one year to the next. I wasn’t saying that I didn’t owe them something because I had been paying money. My problem was that I didn’t owe them $700. I figured I owed them between $250 and $300. I printed off all of the reports and wrote them a letter. That whole process took me 15 minutes.

How long would it take you with your paper checkbook to find 4 of those transactions—a long time? We sent off the letter and they invited us to come and attend a City Council meeting. They called us up and they said we understand you want to talk about your water bill?

I said, did you get my reports and my information? They said, "yes." I said, "What do you think?" They said we think that you have better records than we do.

I had all of the information in Quicken, and without that I am at their mercy. I have nothing to fall back on other than a lot of work to find out what happened. Because I had some information and reports and dates that we could look at, the ball was in their court. They had to go back in time and find a meter reading that was different. I was convinced it was only this 4 or 5 months that we were talking about. It turned out our meter had been broken for 13 months and they had been guesstimating ever since then. We ended up paying $275 because we had the information. This gave us a little bit of control. Those are things that you can use, too.

"How Much Did I Pay To" is the same type of thing, but now we are looking at payees. Am I paying more or less, and what do I owe and own? The Net Worth Report, the Account Balances, the Cash Flow Reports, the Transactions, and then the tax stuff.

Many of you will be happy to see that the icon bar is back across the top. Some folks lost it last year. I haven’t heard the real reason why, but it is back for everybody now and you can even customize this to add the things that you use more frequently in Quicken. I use the checks and the portfolio, but my favorite one is this exit button. I like it because a lot of times during the day I don’t have the energy to get all of the way up to that "X."

Audience: I have two accounts, one called Wells Fargo Bank and one called Wells Fargo Savings. Can I combine the two together the same way?
I don’t understand the combining the two together. The only reason I say this is if you have a Wells Fargo checking account and a Wells Fargo savings account up until the time you combine them they are still two separate entities that have their own transactions in them.

Audience: I have a Wells Fargo savings and a Wells Fargo money market, and when they dropped below $20,000 they started charging me $30 a month to keep that account, so I put the two accounts together and now I have one account that has money in it and another that has no money in it. Can I combine them in this new program?
No, you can’t combine them as the history of the transactions from the first account is still there. What you could do is: essentially you are going to say I have Matt’s checking and Matt’s money market and they are with the same bank. If Matt’s money market drops below that point, I still want to maintain the transactions separately, because if I move them all in it is going to screw up my reconciliation. So I would do a transfer of balance. I would draw all of my money out of it, and now my money market is at $0 balance because all of the money is in checking. You may be closing it out but that history is still there. You really don’t want to combine them because they have to stay separate.

Audience: Is there a difference between Quicken 2001 basic and Quicken 2001 deluxe?
Absolutely. There is a lot. Not so much if you look at the banking tab—there isn’t a lot of difference there because that is in essence the backbone of the software. If you get into the investing area, you won’t have the Capital Gains Estimator, you won’t have the Multiple Security Charting, and you won’t have a lot of the fields in the portfolio that you can track. Under the Household Center, you wouldn’t have tools like the Home Inventory Planner or the Emergency Records Organizer. The Tax Center would still do the taxes, but you wouldn’t have the Capital Gains Estimator. Under the Planning Center, you wouldn’t have the Retirement Planner and a lot of those other features, so it would be scaled down quite a bit in that area.

Audience: Do you have an area where you can set up and track variable annuities?
With annuities and mutual funds and those types of things, it really does depend on who the underwriter for that investment tool is. If it is like Schwab or Fidelity, where they have ticker symbols, we can download that pricing information into Quicken.

I have some stuff with The Travelers Life and Annuity and they don’t provide ticker symbols. What I do is log into my Travelers Web site to see my account and see what the prices are for my securities. Then I right-click on the investment in Quicken and go to "Price History" and here I can do a new price and tell it the date for the close. Then I do a copy and paste from that Web site to this field.

In this way I add my own prices in. You are tracking it in Quicken so it updates your prices and performance and your holdings and those types of things. It is a couple of different steps, but it does make it a little bit easier because it is all stored in the same place. I think the way Travelers works is a goofy deal. Why doesn’t that work? I carry a Quicken credit card, and when I got it, the Travelers underwrote it. They have some of that mechanism in place but they haven’t carried it across the board. Now they are Citibank, and Citibank has that capability, too; they just haven’t carried it off to their other places as well.

Audience: I like to budget by setting aside at the beginning of the year how much I will spend on this and that, such as clothing, utilities, gasoline, and so on. I like to be able to set that up at the beginning of each month so that the computer knows at any time during the month how much I have to spend. Then I like to be able, from time to time, to track and see how much I have left to spend that month. Is there some way I can do that with Quicken?
In Quicken, I don’t spend a lot of time on budgeting. What I do for my budgeting is take last year’s actual spending and that becomes next year’s budget. Within that you can fudge with the numbers. If I have alerts turned on, when I go to enter a transaction and I exceed the spending level, I am reminded I have exceeded the level I had set aside for that category. We also have reports of actual vs. budgeted figures. You can get a report each month to compare and see how you did in all of these different areas. There is some flexibility there also. It can be done for the entire year and it can be broken out for each month or the entire year.

We have forms out on the back table because we have offered special pricing on Quicken for user groups. Quicken Deluxe 2001 retails in the stores for $60. The user group price is $29.95 and you don’t have to horse around with any rebates. If you use check, Visa, or MasterCard it is $29.95. We accept cash, but if you pay by cash we charge $.05 to handle cash. The net price is $30.

Quicken 2001 Home and Business is everything we have just looked at. It is all of the Deluxe, plus it has the ability to do some things for the small business. There is a "Business" tab at the top where you can do invoices, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and those types of things for a small business while still using Quicken, so you don’t have to learn QuickBooks or something like that.

The last one on there is the 2001 Suite, which is really five programs. Four CDs—five programs. One is the Deluxe that we just looked at, one is the Quicken Family Lawyer (the old Parsons Technology thing) which has wills, power of attorney, and those sort of things for 150 different documents in it. The third one is Turbo Tax, that you would be using now to file last year’s taxes. The fourth one is a free download of Turbo Tax State, which installs into Turbo Tax so that when you do your federal return, you are doing your state return as well. The fifth program is Norton Clean Sweep. They have thrown that in, I guess, to help the people who have Microsoft Money get that off their computer. That retails in the store for $100. The user group price that we had listed here is $49.95. That is a typo. It should be $39.95.

If you want you can fill these out and give them to me, or you can take it home with you tonight. It says on the form "valid for today only" but if you will notice on the top there is a mailing address and a fax number. There is a Web site order spot, too, that you can use. It goes out to all of the clubs, even the ones we don’t visit. For the ones we don’t visit there is a $5 shipping charge. If you want to mail it in or fax it in you can save that portion.