CUSTOMER SERVICE MEMO CSTP0403

for 2004 Edition of HowardSoft's Tax Preparer®

Accessing data in folders other than C:\TAX

Perspective. If you choose the default installation for Tax Preparer and never change the settings for Storage Disk spec, you will never have a problem finding or accessing your data because it will always be stored in the same folder as the Tax Preparer program. As a result, you can leave the Storage Disk spec blank and the program will always find the data. But if you store your data in a different folder you may not be able to find or access the data with Tax Preparer if you use long names for the folders or have moved your data using a program other than Tax Preparer. This memo addresses both finding and accessing your data under a variety of circumstances.

Entry must use short-name equivalents for folders. The Windows operating system gives you great flexibility in naming folders, including long names with embedded spaces. However, the computer assigns short-name equivalents to folders with names longer than 8 characters or names with embedded spaces, and uses the short names in its internal operations. For example, the folder My documents is encoded as MYDOCU~1 on most computers. Tax Preparer requires that you use the short names in your entry for Storage Disk spec. For example, if you choose to store your data in C:\My documents\Tax Data, you must generally enter C:\MYDOCU~1\TAXDAT~1 as your Storage Disk spec. in order for Tax Preparer to access your data. (If there is more than one long name starting with the same 6 characters, the short-name equivalents will contain ~2, ~3, etc., in place of ~1 for all but the first one.)

Entry limited to 25-characters. Your entry into Tax Preparer is limited by the size of the entry space set for Tax Preparer, which is currently 25 characters wide. You are therefore limited in the number of sub-folders that your path can contain, although the use of shorter names reduces the restrictions. For example, you cannot store your data in the folder C:\My Documents\Tax Date\Tax Year 2003 because the short-name equivalent is 29 characters long (such as C:\MYDOCU~1\TAXDAT~1\TAXYEA~2). However, you CAN store your data in the folder C:\My Documents\Tax Date\2003 because its short-name equivalent is 25 characters long (such as C:\MYDOCU~1\TAXDAT~1\2003). (Note that we plan to raise the limit to 35 characters starting with the 2005 Edition for the 2004 tax year.)

What Tax Preparer can't find the data. If, after following the above instructions you still cannot get Tax Preparer to recognize the existence of the data, you may have to use at least one of the following tools:

• Locate the data using Find. To find your tax data, you can use the Find command that is built into Windows. For example, to find the location of tax data created with the 2004 Edition of Tax Preparer you would click Start then Find, enter TS04IUSV.Z00 in the entry box for "Named:", and select the proper drive in the entry box for "Look in:". Once you click "Find Now" the computer will search for the data and show you the folder in which it resides (using the long names). (If no folder is found, your data either does not exist on the selected drive or the data is incomplete. To find whether any tax data exits at all, you can enter TS*.* in place of TS04IUSV.Z00. If you find that there is tax data for the desired year, you can call Customer Service for further help in determining what data is missing.)
• Determine the short names using MS-DOS Prompt (If the folder in which your data resides and the path to that folder uses only short names with no embedded spaces, you can skip this step. The folder found in the preceding step is all you need.) Once you have determined the long name(s) for the folder that contains your data, you can use the MS-DOS Prompt program to determine the short names. The DIR command in MS-DOS Prompt shows, in each row, the short name followed by size, date, time, and the long name. (You may have to use DIR /-W to get all this information. If the information fills more than one screen use DIR /-W /P to pause the display upon each screen-full of information.) Once you have determined all the short names you need for all the folders in your path, enter Exit (and Enter) to leave MS-DOS Prompt.

If you need further help, be sure to call HowardSoft Customer Service for more details on finding your data or determining short-name equivalents of long names.