Let me tell you about the biggest annoyance I found while using the Web-based service, "TaxACT Online", to prepare my 2006 income tax returns. There are two reasons for telling you this: - Since I consider this the worst problem I encountered, my recounting it will allow you to judge for yourself what my calling their service "relatively painless" really means.
- If you choose to use them, and you run across the same problem yourself, knowing about it in advance will help you to work around it.
The problem was that it was harder than it should have been to paste information into their software from other applications; for example, from Moneydance, the personal finance package that I use. I do almost all my computing on a Macintosh these days, and that includes preparing my taxes. I regret that I don't know whether Windows users would have the same problem or not. Also, I use Firefox (currently, version 1.5.0.11). TaxACT does list "Firefox 1.0 and higher" among the browsers they support on the Mac -- you can find the full list on their "system requirements" page, [currently] at https://www.taxactonline.com/s_online_tax2006/introduction/requirements.asp -- but still, I can't say for sure whether you're likely to have the problem, unless you're using the same browser. At any rate: on other sites, I can paste into a text entry field, in Firefox, the same way I would in most other Mac applications: by pressing Command-V. That even works in other parts of TaxACT Online's site. It just doesn't work during what they call the "Q & A": the part of the site where you're actually entering information that will go into your tax return. After a while, it occurred to me to try another way of pasting information into TaxACT's "Q & A". Namely, I right-clicked within the text field where I wanted to paste the information. (If I'd been using a traditional, one-button Macintosh mouse, I'd have needed to Control-click, instead.) And what do you know, that worked: it gave me a pop-up menu that included "Paste", and selecting that menu item gave me what I wanted: it pasted whatever was in my Mac's Clipboard into the data entry field. I only wish I'd thought of trying that sooner. I wasted a good chunk of time: both in actually retyping information, and in double- and triple-checking to make sure I'd done so correctly. (I trust the accuracy of Paste a good deal more than I trust my own typing.) So now, if you decide to use TaxACT Online (I do recommend them), and you encounter this particular data entry problem, you'll know how to work around it, and you won't waste as much time as I did.
Categorie(s) for this post:
Personal Finance Software.
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