My experience has been mostly with TurboTax.
>
> My biggest gripe boils down to the software making me do things that I
> bought the computer to do for me. The software should minimize the
> mental effort I expend searching. The computer does not know what I want
> so I realize I must explicitly tell the computer what to search for.
> Nevertheless, I should be able to search for a term occurring anywhere
> in an open window whether or not it is in data or in the text of the > forms. >
> I should be able to search the list of forms by key word including the
> form number. I should not have to do a visual search of the list
> requiring me read each line to find the form I want.
Haven't you posted this same complaint before? Or was it someone else?
When you click on "Open Form", you can type a keyword into the search field to filter down to the forms that match.
If I jump amongst a series of forms, each form should remember where my
> cursor was when I last visited that form. I should not have to search to
> find my place the way I do when I close a book I am reading without > marking it.
When opening a form there's a checkbox "Open in separate window". If you do this, each window remembers its cursor location.
If you close a window, everything about it is forgotten (except the data, of course).
A program like TurboTax sometimes has an entry that can be modified by
> several sources or forms. Sometimes that operation can be buggy. That
> can be done using record data structures for entry. The record structure
> can have components that can be filled by all the forms that can affect
> it along with an indication of which component is the one to be used. I
> think object oriented programming may also be a suitable approach, but I
> am not very familiar with those techniques.
Programs like TurboTax are basically a fancy facade on a spreadsheet.