From: lsr@taligent.com (Larry Rosenstein)
Subject: Re: Tax Cut: Alternative for MacInTax's disgruntled users?
Followup-To: comp.sys.mac.apps
Organization: Taligent, Inc.
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 01:59:59 GMT

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