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There are several ways to acquire Visual Intelligence:

• Purchase the full version of VI directly off of Corel's eStore (coming in the next few days)
• Get the trial version of VI directly from the trial menus on Corel.com (coming in the next few days) - it is a full 30 day trial of the product
• Get a Starter Edition included for free when you purchase WPO X4
  

The buy web page is ambiguous.  Higher end versions are priced per user per year, but the home edition indicates only a price of $99.  However, the qualifying note beneath suggests that all of the licenses are annual only.  Can you confirm whether the home edition is multi-year?  I would be looking at VI as a replacement for portfolio management features in Quicken. This application is not only expensive, but also the user interface frustrates the hell out of me.  However, as Intuit has repeatedly demonstrated, home users do not deal well with annual license renewal fees.

Hi Ian,

The Home Edition is indeed perpetual (multi-year) and it is less expensive than the other editions.  We see the higher end versions as being more applicable to corporate type users who are somewhat more used to yearly licenses or software maintenance.  But, I also think that the internet connectivity and ease of use (e.g. being able to visualize data versus seeing a spreadsheet) make this an ideal solution for consumers.

What are your UI frustrations?  How do you see using this product specifically versus Quicken?  I would be curious to explore your thoughts so we can make it easier for others to see the potential going forward.

Before you make your product decision, please also consult the edition comparison to make sure it will meet your data set size needs.

Cheers,

Jay

Hi Jay

I recently tried to return to the full Quicken product rather than the cash manager in order to use the portfolio tracking features in that product. However, I quickly discovered that they had changed the UI from the original checkbook paradigm to something that was completely form based. If, which is rare in Canada, you work with an investment organization that offers Quicken downloads, there is probably no problem. But, as you are no doubt aware, less banks are willing to pay the fees that Intuit levies to support the downloads. In my case, I found that manually entering portfolio information in the new quicken UI was error-prone and very time=consuming. Not only that, I found it was almost impossible to synchronize the data to provide historical information relevant to my portfolio.   What I was really interested in VI was using QPro as the data entry application (checkbook register) and then bringing that data into VI to monitor my accounts. I plan to look at IMacros for Firefox to see whether I can create a screen scraper to extra the source data from the bank website  and enter it into  QP.   The real problem is that Intuit has so locked down their application's ability to import data, that it is almost unusable. The older Quicken I used to use was quite good before recent improvements.  So, portfolio management is one area where VI could be improved to make it more consumer friendly.