[geeks] tax software rant

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 @ 08:11 -0400, Phil Stracchino said:

> In a word ..... no.  Last time I used TurboTax, I hated it.  The damn
> thing was too busy "helping" me to let me get the job done, and when it
> became convinced there were errors in the return, I had to jump through
> nineteen different hoops to (a) bludgeon it into letting me fix the ones
> that were errors, and (b) convince the damned thing that the others
> weren't actually errors, just places where it had pulled in a form or
> worksheet it didn't need.

You can tell it to let you do it manually.

Also, I can't see how it could pull in forms by accident.  It only pulls
up the forms you ask for.  You have to specifically say yes, at least
that's how it worked for me.

Another guy told me about some issues he had, and I wasn't able to
duplicate it in any way.  We met in a store and walked over to one of
the computers on display and played with the site, and he said it
didn't even look like the same site compared to what he saw at home.

Get this: he runs Windows.  The machine in the store was a Mac, and my
machine runs Linux.

It's about time Windows users had to suffer... :)

Aside:

Why can't they create a tax web site (or others for that matter), that
juse use plain HTML forms?

All the fancy crap just puts a higher burden on your browser, and
increases the changes of a crash or memory leak.

All I want is the basic forms, run through them, and be done. I don't
need spiraling monkey prompts or any of that other "Web 2.0" nonesense.

If I want a GUI application, I'll go buy a tax program and not deal with
the latency of the online version.

(grumble)


-- 
shannon /     Trouble rather the tiger in his lair than the sage amongst 
-------'      his books For to you kingdoms and their armies are
              mighty and enduring,  but to him they are but toys of
              the moment to be overturned by the flicking of a finger.