After you convert to Microsoft Money 98 or later from an earlier version, you may be asking "why is my converted file so big?"

The Money 5.0 database had the advantage of being very small and extremely fast, but it had the disadvantage of being hard to modify. Given the scope of the features that we wanted to add to Money, we knew we needed to find a different database. We chose the Jet database for Money because it gave us the flexibility we needed to implement new features now, and for future versions of Money as well.

When making this decision we had to consider the file size and performance of the Jet database and how these would impact our users. We felt the features that we added to Money outweighed the short-term cost of the file size and the performance. It is obvious that file size and performance are a big concern and we've made a commitment to continue working on this for the next version of Money.

We realize that one of the most important activities for our users is the ability to back up your personal file to a diskette. To ensure that you can continue to back up your files, we added compression to the backup option in Money. Files are compressed when you back up to a disk or when you back up to your hard disk, and most files will fit on a disk. For those users who are long-time Money users and have very large files, you can decrease the size of your Money file by archiving old data.