Tax Assistant for Excel is a set of Excel worksheets that assist users in completing their income taxes using forms 1040 or 1040A. We’re not sure why a user would want to use Excel for taxes when there are so many programs and Web sites that are better-suited to the job, and functional problems in Tax Assistant for Excel make it even less attractive.

The workbook presents users with Excel versions of IRS forms and workbooks with an introductory page that’s supposed to provide instructions. Unfortunately, we kept receiving error messages about macros (although we had enabled macros in Excel), and clicking the arrows to expand the instructions resulted in a message about protected sheets. Although we suppose it would be possible to complete our taxes using the workbook anyway–it does come with PDFs of the official IRS instructions–in the end, we just didn’t see the point. There are plenty of programs and Web sites that will walk users through the tax preparation process, make sure that users maximize their refunds (or minimize their liabilities), and then file the tax return electronically. Excel is a comparatively low-tech way to prepare one’s taxes, and though this program may have been a good idea in the days before electronic filing was available, it’s all but obsolete now.

Tax Assistant has a 10-day trial period. It installs and uninstalls without issues. We do not recommend this program; there are many more-efficient ways to do your taxes.

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Checkbook for Excel is a truly easy-to-use checkbook application that can help alleviate the anxiety of keeping track of expenses, deposits, service fees, and other details of keeping a checking account on the money.

It’s so much better than your average paper checkbook register, Checkbook for Excel can be customized to track expenses; flag tax-related events; manage one’s PayPal expenses, deposits and fees; prepare and print reports; even print checks. All you have to do is set up a ledger sheet for each financial account you wish to manage. It is here you will be prompted to provide the details (name and address of creditor, amount, whether recurring, and more) of each expense and deposit. And it is in these details that the complexity of managing one’s financial life becomes, well, less complex. The most challenging part of Checkbook for Excel is making sure you remember to actually enter the data, particularly those ATM withdrawals. You can also split category designations, which is particularly helpful if you want to track childcare expenses that may be of tax consequence. The only limiting factor is that you cannot create a new category (such as “beekeeping”), but instead rely on a generic miscellaneous category.

You have 30 days to try out Checkbook for Excel. The Help features are very straightforward and well placed throughout the application. It is a smart, easy-to-use checkbook application with the right kind of sensible extras that make managing one’s financial life less complex.

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