Review by Long-Suffering Technology Consumer

..but TurboTax can help ease the pain.

This is the 14th year I’ve used TurboTax for our state and federal returns, and this version is as good as any Intuit has offered (some years have offered better user experiences that others).

Of the many changes that personal computing and online services have brought to our household, one of the things I appreciate most is the taming of the onerous chore of tax preparation into something much simpler. Tax time before TurboTax used to be a three-day long parade of headache-inducing calculations and HOPING I had all the correct forms. TurboTax has turned three days of extended misery into a couple hours of compressed misery…but misery that is free of anxiety over math error and interpreting IRS instructions. Intuit had rough period in the early 2000s with privacy and functionality in TurboTax (and a STINGY approach to how many users could prepare taxes from a single copy). Happily, those days are far in the past.

This version allows you to prepare up to five federal returns. Installation was issue free and updating (since January) has been were painless on a Windows 7 machine. Because I had data from last year’s edition on my computer already, our personal data was already filled in, and it smartly queried about the same sources of income and interest and deductions/credits as last year. It also easily handled two major changes in our filing situation.

With all of my tax documents at hand, and a moderately complex 1040 filing scenario, I was finished in less than an hour. Sweet. Error checking was painless, and –72 hours before the deadline– efiling the payments due were also problem-free. Note that federal filing is free, but state efiling cost $19.95.

Select with confidence!