Income tax translation nightmare

[Works Dept.]

For years I've used Excel for all taxes, accounting and whatnot. A client sent me a 2-page form 1040 to translate. The OCR program converted the mess into another mess of hopeless garble. What I needed was a 1040 in Excel. My own spreadsheets omit all mention of one-legged farmers born between February and March, 1936, televangelist preachers and other irrelevancies. They generate answers I copy into the forms with a pencil. 

So I searched and found Glenn, of incometaxspreadsheet fame--a shareware programmer in Excel.

Tax forms used to be linear and in the 1970s you went from top to bottom with a calculator. Not so today. The forms are deliberately designed to crash Excel. Glenn  has a light version online that is compatible with the antique Excel I prefer to all the post-suicide Hasta La Vista stuff. So I stripped the Form 1040 from the rest of the "Lite" tax forms set, added the client's input numbers, names and addresses and sent them a pdf of the form, which I had to do on 4pp of virtual landscape legal paper format to make it fit. This was an experiment, to see reproducing the tax forms would be acceptable. Client said it looked OK and I could go ahead and translate that. 

Next I loaded the 2-page sheet into my memoQ translation software, did the translation, and crash city!

No way would the thing export. This was not so surprising because the forms, designed to crash, require Excel 10 to handle the whole suite and I was using 2003. Then again, there were only two pages! I removed formulas, killed external links, formatted numbers as numbers-and-not-text... y nada!

Kilgray was not very helpful but did suggest I try .xml format. By this time Thelma had picked up the gauntlet and thought of that trick independently. She ran a retranslate (there were only about five numbers, names and addresses in the whole form--the problem was the form not the added data). Finally she added some Excel-specific tool to Omega-T and got the thing to export. Some of the fields are cramped, but it worked. 

Bottom line: Glenn has spreadsheets you can add data to and translate rather than spend a year unscrambling an OCR abortion. If your expensive CATwarez fail, Omega-T has a plug in for excel that can save the day.