QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Live Community

Live Community is a portal to Intuit’s QuickBooks community message boards. The system is simple to use: You ask a question, and Live Community checks whether it’s already been answered by someone else who uses QuickBooks. If none of the answers it finds are what you want, you can pose your question to the community. By the same token, you can post your solutions to questions that others have asked. All this user involvement is what makes Live Community, well, lively.

The downside to Live Community is that you can’t control the answers that the feature displays. You’ll see different responses depending on how you phrase your question, there’s no way to scan all the questions that others have posted and the answers they received.

Tip

If you want to scan existing questions and answers, see The QuickBooks Community to learn how to review the QuickBooks community message boards without Live Community’s help.

You have to create an Intuit User ID to use Live Community. The first time you submit a question, Live Community asks you to sign in. If you didn’t set up an Intuit account when you installed QuickBooks, you can do that now (Setting Up QuickBooks on a Network).

Here’s how you use Live Community after you sign in:

1. Choose Help→Live Community or click Live Community in QuickBooks’ icon bar.

   The “Have a Question?” window opens to the Live Community tab.

2. In the box containing the text “Type your question here” (Figure B-3, background), do just that and then click the Ask My Question ...