Turbo Tax is so simple to use. They walk you through step by step, They check to make sure you get the maximum discount by checking out all potential deductions that may apply to you. I use Turbo Tax every year. I even used some online help support through chat for special tax circumstances.
Pros: My job status changed this year (switched jobs, lost a job, got a raise or promotion), I bought or sold investments
I have been using Turbo Tax for eleven or twelve years now and the program has always helped me get thru doing my income taxes without a lot of pain and suffering except for paying the taxes that I owe. I do not think that I could just pick up the forms and started filling them out without getting lost in the forms. Turbo Tax makes it easy to do taxes. Enough said. Wait til next year.
This software doesn't change much from year to year. Once you're familiar with it, it is easy to use, and pretty straightforward.
I do wish it were better at explaining where figures come from. For example, when you ask it where your tax-exempt income came from, it just dumps you onto the worksheet with all the 1099s (both DIV and INT - tax-exempt income shows up on both). Implicitly it is saying: here - you go figure it out. It would be better if it produced a list (similar to Schedule B) or at least highlighted the figures that went into the sum.
The state form almost never lets you zoom in to see where figures came from.
TurboTax asked simple questions to gather information and offered detailed explanations when I needed them. It got us the best refund possible with no headaches!