SEARCH:

NAVIGATION:

Incident Report: Turbo Tax

Product fills out federal income tax forms.

After working on my 2001 return, I was interested in checking a figure in a prior year. One would expect that since the Open File dialog box displays prior year files that it could open them, or at least complain about them if it could not.

Well it did complain, but not in any language I'm familiar with:

• Any given version of TurboTax works with files from only one year, I suspect; so it should have been easy for the designers to state that the file could not be opened because it was created with a different year's version and that version was needed to open it.
• Failing the above, the error message could have been improved markedly by starting with "Incompatible file: ...". That would tell me, the user, what the issue was, while the "Load Error 539 in S1997ZOR" would be helpful to TurboTax's technical support people if I chose to call them.

Overall a fine product, top of its class for years. A good implementation of hyperlinked tax forms, though I still occasionally encounter places where it could do a better job showing me where a number came from. (On one recent instance, even calling technical support could not shed light on where it came from; I happened upon the source for that particular data hours later while searching for something else...)

Copyright © 2001-2013 Michael Sorens • Contact us • Privacy Policy
Usage governed by Mozilla Public License 1.1 and CleanCode Courtesy License