2008-09-15

MS Money Plus error: "This operation cannot be performed"

Two years passed since I last bought MSFT Money. That meant I could no longer use it for online banking.

It makes little sense to me why they cap the banking service at two years, other than to make people purchase the updated version. I didn't need any of the new features. I've been pretty happy with the feature set for the past six or seven years. Regardless, I had to upgrade if I wanted to continue to use on line banking in the same way.

The latest version of Money -- Microsoft Money Plus is no longer available in retail stores. You now have to purchase it and download it from Microsoft or a different vendor. I'm still a fan of shrink wrap software, so this was mildly frustrating, too.

Since I don't like Quicken, though, I bought and downloaded Money.

I made a back up of my data file and the downloaded application. Next, I installed the new software. It seemed to work well, and it seemed to import my file properly, but then the error started.

Every time I went to the main landing page, it said "This operation cannot be performed." It gave the option of clicking "Okay" or "More information." I clicked okay and got this error message:

"This operation cannot be performed."

It gave me the same option again. And I got the same result.

"This operation cannot be performed."

This went on for 10 or 15 clicks and then I would get to the landing page. Every time I tried to get to that page, it told me 10 or 15 time that the operation couldn't be performed.

If I chose the more information option, I got this:


You can see how helpful that is.

Everything seemed to work fine, but those extra 10 or 15 clicks were starting to wear out my mouse.

Google to the Rescue!

A quick Google search took me to this Live Journal page by Edmund Wong. He apparently went through the same thing.

When Money imports the date file from a previous version, it can corrupt the budget data. To fix the problem, delete the old budget. Once you delete the old budget, the error message goes away and you can create a new budget.

So now instead of an old budget that I never used, I now have a new budget that I'll never use.

And that's what we call progress.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Don't you just love it when a "feature" you could care less about prevents you from using what you do want to use? My other pet-peeve is developing work-arounds to make software do waht you want it to do... and having an "upgrade" prevent the workarounds, making the software less useful. While we're at it... how about websites coded only for Internet Explorer? Lazy programming. And I think a lot of it is because programmers can be clueless about how the software is actually used in the real world. They confuse features with usability.