QuickBooks 2013 has a new look and feel on the home page, icon bar and the forms themselves. Many people like the new updates and changes or most of them. However, there are some people who are having major problems working in QuickBooks 2013. This post will discuss some of the changes, how to customize the icon bar and the poll results on what people think of the changes to QuickBooks 2013.
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Changes to the Home Page and Icon Bar
The home page has had minor changes and updated colors as you can see in the image below. More noticeable is the changes to the icon bar. New in QuickBooks 2013 is the left panel icon bar. There is a little customization available but not much. You cannot make changes to the ‘Do More with QuickBooks’ section nor can you remove this section.
One of the primary complaints is the gray-scale icons. At this time, you cannot change the colors of the icons. You can minimize the left icon bar with the arrow at the top of the pane. You can also switch to use the top icon bar and left open window list if you prefer. Go to View > Top Icon Bar and then View > Open Windows List and it will look like this age below.
Ribbon Toolbar on Forms
On the forms (invoices, sales receipts, estimates, bills, etc.), there is a new ribbon toolbar. This is similar to the toolbar found in MS Word, Excel and other MS Office products. By moving things to one convenient toolbar, this helped clean up the forms. Plus, some features or functionality was only available when you right clicked on the form so some people were not aware of it. Now, people think some things are new because they are seeing it on the ribbon toolbar for the first time. People seem to really like the ribbon toolbar.
Increased Fonts and Spacing
Throughout the program, many of the font sizes have been increased resulting in wider rows / lines to help with readability. Some people have complaint that they do not see as many lines and have to scroll more. In the upper, left corner click to maximize the window and see it almost full screen as shown below.
Looking at the invoice above, you’ll also notice more white space at the top of the form. Also notice the smaller spaces for the bill to and ship to information — this is another source of complaints.
At the bottom of the invoice (and elsewhere), notice the light gray, small text. This has been a major problem for some people. Some people indicate that they actually cannot see this at all. There are some long time, heavy QuickBooks users who physically cannot work in QuickBooks 2013 for more than an hour or so or they get migraine headaches. They have communicated their complaints and concerns to Intuit but it is unclear at this point if Intuit is investigating or considering any changes or not.
Changing the Desktop Color
Many people like to change the desktop color to differentiate QuickBooks files as explained in this blog post (you can still change the account color as indicated in that post). You cannot change the desktop color in QuickBooks 2013. Many people have complained about this and Intuit indicated there were investigating possible changes. Hopefully a future update will allow us to change the desktop color again.
Poll Results on QuickBooks 2013
Below are the results of a quick, unscientific poll to get feedback on what people like or do not like about the changes to the look of QuickBooks 2013. 
What do you think about the cosmetic changes to QuickBooks 2013? Post your comment below (and subscribe to this blog) to be entered to win QuickBooks Pro 2013.