TurboTax Problems: Alternatives; Connectix working on a fix

Alternatives We previously reported one user's complaint of being stuck with 7 years of Turbo Tax data and no way to do his taxes on a Mac thanks to TurboTax's incompatibility with new releases of Connectix's Virtual PC and a serious lack of functionality in native Mac Intuit products. Wayne Schwartz suggests Tax Cut as an alternative:

"I suggest checking out Tax Cut. They have products for both the Mac and Windows. They have a personal version for the Mac (Tax Cut Platinum) but they have numerous versions for Windows including Tax Cut Platinum Home and Business)."

Ralph Strauch notes that the form tool contained in the full version of Adobe Acrobat can be used to fill out some IRS forms:

"One way of filling out forms which are available in PDF format, as all IRS forms are, is to use the form tool in Adobe Acrobat to make the forms editable, then fill them out in Acrobat. This isn't as good as a tax program, obviously, because it doesn't do the calculations, but for those of us who have become computerdependent, it's better than filling them out by hand."

Connectix working on a fix Connectix is currently beta testing a solution for Turbo Tax's inability to properly run under new releases of Virtual PC. A posting to the company's support forums from a Connectix engineer reads:

"I just found the issue which causes TurboTax Deluxe 2002 to crash at installation time. We will need some time to fully qualify the fix and to make sure that something else is not broken with TurboTax (I only ran it once). Because of the holidays and MacWorld in early January, this is likely to take several weeks at bare minimum.

"I expect that this fix will be made available in a future maintenance release of Virtual PC as soon as we are confident we have resolved the issues with TurboTax."

We previously reported that while Intuit offers a Macintosh version of Turbo Tax Deluxe 2002, some users opt to purchase the basic Windows and use it under Virtual PC due to the higher cost of the Mac version, and special offers only provided with the PC release. With the advent of TurboTax Basic 2002 for Windows, this is no longer an option, as the release is the first to be incompatible with Virtual PC.

TurboTax for Business, Intuit's product for C Corps, Partnerships, and Trusts, is also incompatible with Virtual PC. This is even more distressing, as the company does not make a similar product for the Mac platform at any price.

Feedback on this issue? Drop us a line at late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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