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Quicken 2001 For Dummies Quick Reference
Grasping Graphs in Quicken
Adapted From: Quicken 2001 For Dummies Quick Reference

The quickest way to see how you stand financially is to generate a graph. As with reports, you can tinker with graphs to make them display the financial data you are curious about. To create one of Quicken's six ready-to-wear graphs:

  1. Choose Reports, Reports and Graphs Center.

  2. Select a topic on the left side of the window and select the name of a graph.

The six basic graph options are:

Net Worth: A bar graph that shows, month by month, how your assets and liabilities stack up to produce your net worth.

Income/Expense: A bar graph comparing monthly income and expenses and a pie chart showing each expense as a percentage of total expenses.

Budget Variance: Two bar graphs, one comparing budgeted income goals to actual income and one comparing budgeted spending to actual spending.

Investment Asset Allocation: Bar charts that show how investments perform by allocation.

Investment Performance: Two bar charts, one showing the month-by-month value of your portfolio and another that shows your average return for the year.

Portfolio Value and Cost Basis: A line chart that shows the value of your portfolio in dollars as well as the value when taking into account the total cost of purchasing securities.

  1. Click the Create Now button or double-click the name of the graph.

The graph appears in a new window.

If you want to change the graph's default data, you can customize it. All categories and all classes of data from all the accounts go into the making of an off-the-shelf Quicken graph; however, you can change these settings to exclude certain accounts, categories, and classes. Also, Quicken graphs cover the year to date, but you can tell Quicken to plot data from past years or from just last month.


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