rstanton@portia.Stanford.EDU (Richard Stanton) (11/27/90)
As promised, here's a quick summary of the reports I received on Parsons Technology. If anyone specifically wants the original replies, e-mail me and I'll send them to you. In general, people's reactions were positive. This applies particularly to Money Counts. With the tax program, most people liked it, though one person hated it (last year's version - I don't know what changes have been made). People seemed to like their customer support, when they tried it, though few seem to have needed it. Now for my own reactions. I recently bought It's Legal, a program to write simple wills, leases etc. It seems to be worth the $29 it cost, and is pretty easy to use, though it has some features I don't like too much. First, there are some fields that require "correct" input. This is in general a good idea, but the problem is that if you are in one of these fields, you can't use page up or page down to change screens without first entering a valid response. In addition, the help function could be improved. I like to see no help at all until I press F1, then get whatever I need. In this program, the help screens appear in sequence as part of the data entry process. Thus you have to go past them every time you edit a will etc, but in addition, there's no nice "popup" help that you can look at and then go right back to where you were. When I tried setting an odd (not = 55, the default) number of lines per page, the printed output looked odd. the pages came out of different lengths, and on one page, half a sentence came below the page number. Finally, I tried the 800 number (sales number) to ask if the tax program supports the DeskJet+ (last year TurboTax had a problem with this, though they're supposed to have it fixed this year). All they could tell me was that it supports "many dot-matrix, laser printers...", and referred me to the (not toll-free) service support number for more information. I've decided to stick to TurboTax this year, though Parsons program is probably fine. One person's comment to bear in mind (he had very different impressions of two Parsons products) is that different people seem to write different programs. The behavior of one may be a very poor indicator of that of another. Richard Stanton pstanton@gsb-lira.stanford.edu