TurboTax 2006

I just finished using TurboTax Deluxe 2006 on my Windows machine.

Overall, seemed about as easy as the tax code allows. Kudos.

However, there were a number of bugs and one noticeable inconsistency.

There were bugs that froze the app (adding a charity in It's Deductible), got me stuck with incorrect information getting stored (repeatedly asking for prior year's state tax paid with return, each retry adding another line and more dollars to the total amount of supposed tax paid), and some data entry flakiness (after adding a charity, the one before it alphabetically is selected in It's Deductable, after tabbing to the donation amount in It's Deductible the field would accept one digit until navigating away and back or clicking in the field's box).

All of these were surmountable (but the repeated tax entry could have really stung me if I hadn't figured out what was going on by looking at the tax form, making the correction manually, and concluding there was nothing more in that category that I needed to do so I could just stop there).

The inconsistency I noticed is how "none of these apply to me" is handled. In some cases, you have to check a box and continue, in other cases the topic is phrased "do any of these apply to you" and you click yes or no. The second way works out quicker, and I prefer it (I tend to read closely with the app... I can see how "none of these apply" as an option is a way to increase the likelihood that people read the options, but I don't imagine it takes much for people who don't want to read to learn to look at the last option if they don't think something applies to them).

Overall, pleased with an overall nicely done tool. If only the tax code were simpler...