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- From: lsr@taligent.com (Larry Rosenstein)
- Subject: Re: Tax Cut: Alternative for MacInTax's disgruntled users?
- Message-ID: <lsr-211292173137@lsr.taligent.com>
- Followup-To: comp.sys.mac.apps
- Sender: usenet@taligent.com (More Bytes Than You Can Read)
- Organization: Taligent, Inc.
- References: <22120908390341@vms2.macc.wisc.edu>
- Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 01:59:59 GMT
- Lines: 76
-
- In article <22120908390341@vms2.macc.wisc.edu>, DBBARBER@macc.wisc.edu
- (Deborah B. Barber) wrote:
- >
- > releases of Tax Cut and were going to test it out. Any (hopefully positive)
- > results from testing or support yet? What company makes Tax Cut, and what
-
- I tried it out. The Headstart Version is a bit disappointing because it
- doesn't support 2 important (to me) features: itemizations and import. I
- tend to use itemizations quite a bit and I also wanted to import data from
- Quicken.
-
- I think the user interface has some rough edges.
-
- When you tab into a field it doesn't select the entire contents, which
- makes it difficult to replace the entire thing (which is the common
- operation).
-
- If you cut a field and switch to another window it puts the cut data back
- unless you tab out of the field or hit enter first. Similarly, if you
- paste into a field and forget to hit tab/enter then the stuff you typed
- disappears.
-
- You access forms through a modal dialog, which isn't as convenient as
- MacInTax's menus, but it does make the menus simpler. Also, TaxCut seems
- to support an arbitrary number of copies of any one form, which I don't
- think MacInTax did.
-
- TaxCut lets you find forms in more ways, however. You can get a list of
- topics, for example. They also have the Shoebox, which lets you take a
- form you receive (eg, 1099) and jump to the form where that data is
- entered. This is done from a modal dialog, so it may get tedious. (I
- haven't played with it enough.)
-
- TaxCut has an interview process that asks you questions. I haven't gone
- through the entire interview, but it is somewhat tedious because it puts up
- several extra dialogs (eg, "Congratulations you entered your name and
- address!"). There may be a way to streamline this, but I haven't played
- around with it enough. They tend to display more alerts than they need to
- as well.
-
- It's got a pretty sophisticated online help system that supports hypertext
- links and bookmarks. (Although the program crashed once when I tried to
- close the window. Don't use the Close command or Cmd-W to close the help
- window.)
-
- The performance of TaxCut seems much better than MacInTax. MacInTax always
- seemed to take a while to start up, while TaxCut seems much faster. (I was
- using it on a PowerBook 140.) MacInTax recalculates in the background, but
- it some times takes a while for it to finish.
-
- TaxCut recalculates when you change an entry, but I seem to recall a note
- in the manual that they only recalculate the form you are looking at and
- that it's possible to get into a state where the entire return isn't fully
- updated. But they do a full recalculation when you save and have an
- explicit command to do this. (A full recalculation seems faster than in
- MacInTax.)
-
- TaxCut supports estimated entries by writing them in italics, as opposed to
- the colors and tags that MacInTax uses. (I found the colors distracting.)
- To find estimated values, however, you need to use TaxCut's audit facility.
- (In MacInTax you can tell from the form menu item if a form is
- incomplete.) There doesn't seem to be a way to go from the comments in the
- audit window directly to the indicated line. (But you can print out the
- window.)
-
- I'm disappointed in the features missing from the Headstart Version
- (especially since I paid more for that because I ordered directly from the
- company). The UI problems are annoying but I can live with them. I think
- it provides some useful features that MacInTax didn't (at least last year's
- version) If they were to sit down with a Mac UI person, then it could be a
- lot better MacInTax.
-
- Larry Rosenstein
- Taligent, Inc.
-
- lsr@taligent.com
-