Creating a Numbers spreadsheet to calculate income tax
If you've a little time now and then it's good mental exercise and certainly useful to create a spreadsheet that will calculate your income tax or whatever tax you're paying. This frees you of having to erase errors from paper forms, and since post offices don't provide blanks anymore, that's a tremendous advantage. Over the past few tax seasons I've assembled such a spreadsheet, containing all the forms I use. I starting by writing a 1040 form and adding the A, B, D, E, 8949, and 6251 schedules. I've recently put in a couple of the worksheets found in the various instructions, and my spreadsheet is currently about 80 rows deep and AQ columns wide. Each of the forms contains all the rows I use, so the spreadsheet Is full of IF, AND, and OR functions and lots of adds and subtracts, but the whole thing takes up only about 700 KB of memory. Since all the forms are on the same spreadsheet, cell contents needing to appear in more than one cell instantly do so via cell references. I do end up typing the numbers into the interactive pdf forms and printing them, but that's no biggie after years of messing with an adding machine and pencils. So far, what I've created seems to work okay, since the IRS has not questioned my submissions other than a couple of rules interpretations.
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.4.11), null