TaxAct

What works

I successfully prepared and E-filed 2006 federal and state (Virginia) taxes with TaxACT 2006 in wine. It installed, applied updates from the vendor, applied the deluxe version activation code, and E-filed with zero problems. Printouts are beautiful. Help files work fine.

What does not

TaxACT uses a custom checkbox widget that displays an X in a box (e.g. option to contribute $3 to election fund). The X is not visible under wine. Highlighting of the checkboxes is visible, however, so that it is possible to mentally maintain the checkbox state, and confirm it with print preview.

Printing directly to the printer from Windows does *not* work. A special tax font is used, which wine doesn't translate. However, the deluxe program conviently prints to PDF, and the PDF files contain the proper fonts all encapsulated. You may then print the PDF from a linux program, like Adobe Acrobat or Gnome Document Viewer. The print to PDF feature is disabled for the standard version, but another user reports that wine 0.9.30 prints correctly.

The printed forms use ellipses, which seem to be placed slightly off, but I haven't seen the printout from Windows. On 1040EZ, some other variable text is not placed properly. This is very minor and does not affect legibility or ability to mail in the forms.

Printing of input forms, e.g. W-2, does not work when printing to PDF. I haven't tried this in Windows. (And my last Win98 disk is dead).

Some menu options are supposed to take you to an URL in a web browser. These do not work. The URLs in question are for online documentation, and are easily found starting with their home page, so this is not a big deal. I have firefox-2.0.0.2 installed under linux as my web browser, accessible via htmlview.

Workarounds

What was not tested

I did not test all forms and schedules. TaxACT is engine based, so this should not matter. I tested all the types of widgets used in the forms.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Check boxes still broken in 0.9.41.