Turbotax

I hate doing my taxes.  Boring. And, the amount of money taken by Uncle Sam is always a downer.  And the mountains of paperwork, 1099, W-2, 140, Schedule A,B,D,E... X,Y,Z.  Aargh!
  For years I have been doing them with an Excel spreadsheet. But this year I gave up, I bought Turbotax, and got on with it.  I have to say, Turbotax reduces the pain enough to justify the program's cost.  It comes in four levels. Lowest and cheapest level only does fairly simple returns.  I had to buy level 3 ($90) before the program would handle the capital gains you get when you sell some stock.  The interface is pretty user friendly, like 100% better than anything you find in those IRS instruction sheets.  The program offers to download your 1099 forms from your stock broker, but for this feature to work you have to have "opened" a web window, complete with username and password into your stock account.  I never did that, fearing  hackers would get in and steal everything I own.  So I had to type in all the numbers from the 1099s.  But that's not too bad, I touch type, once it's down, you are golden.
  Turbotax urges your strongly to efile.  I don't, 'cause when you efile, your return can go right into the IRS computers, and if you screwed up, those computers will be on your case for more money quicktime. If IRS has to hand key your return into their computers, or even just run it thru an optical scanner, they may not bother if your return looks reasonable.
   Don't ask Turbotax to "print" your return.  When I did so, it printed out 44 pages of return and then fell into a loop printing page after page of pure gibberish.  Instead ask Turbotax to make a pdf file of your return.  Then print it out using Adobe.
   Turbotax understands all the obscure extra forms that you can file to get little tax breaks here and there.  It did a couple of forms I'd never seen before and saved me bits and pieces of money.