MacInTax Federal 1990 Softview 1721 Pacific Avenue Suite 100 Oxnard, CA 93033 805/385-5000 800/622-6829 76702,1174 at CompuServe SOFTVIEW at GEnie SOFTVIEW at AppleLink SOFTVIEW at MCI Mail [email protected] (Internet format) Rating: 9 Penguins out of a possible 10 Summary: -- MacInTax is the tax-preparation program of choice, with its intuitive interface, excellent screen display, and accurate printouts

I first had to pay taxes years ago (OK, four years ago) when I was a junior in college. Before that time, students were more or less exempt from the annual ritual unless they were used as tax shelters by too-wealthy parents (i.e

MacInTax comes on two disks and requires that you use its installation program to copy the files to your hard disk. The installer program is a special version of StuffIt (but not StuffIt Deluxe) and it isn't terribly capable - all it does is ask you which folder to copy the files to

When you start up the program for the first time, it searches for all the forms (which it does on each startup - kind of irritating) and then displays a window explaining the difference between the various 1040 forms (1040, 1040A, 1040EZ, 1040X for amended tax returns, and 1040-ES for estimated taxes) so you can figure out which one to file

So what's left? The numbers that you enter into your tax forms come from a number of different sources, and MacInTax doesn't help a great deal here, although it will let you import data from other applications (the manual doesn't say which ones are supported) and from text files

This is probably the most common word associated with tax preparation, and although MacInTax does a good basic job at helping you fill out the forms, it doesn't do much more

The MacInTax manual is good, but not great. There is an introduction, eight chapters, seven appendixes, and an index. The introduction is just that, and the first two chapters walk you through installation and basic usage

If you still do your taxes by hand with your Macintosh turned off on the desk in front of you, buy MacInTax. If you call MacConnection before 3:15 AM, you can go to sleep and they'll have it at your door the next day so you can save an incredible amount of time in preparing the stupid tax return