# TurboTax tip: Save your returns as PDF files



## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

I'm not a TurboTax user but I know it's very popular for doing income taxes. I discovered a tip that will hopefully be of use to the TurboTax users out there. 

The background:
About a year ago, a friend bought a new PC to replace her dinosaur running XP Home Edition. On her dinosaur, she had TurboTax 2007 (installed from CD, I believe) and TurboTax 2008 (downloaded from the Intuit website) installed. On the new machine (running Vista), we re-downloaded TurboTax 2008 and installed that. We transfered ALL of her TurboTax files from her old machine to the new one.

Fast forward to yesterday, she needed to print out a 2007 tax return for a client of hers. So, she tried to open the return in TurboTax 2008 and it refused to load the file but instructed her to start a new 2008 return and transfer the 2007 data to the new return. This is NOT what she wanted to do at all. She just wanted to print the 2007 return.

Fortunately, we had NOT nuked her old machine in preparation to give it away yet so she was able to run TurboTax 2007 on that machine to access the 2007 return for printing. At that point, I told her that she will need to keep EVERY TurboTax application for EVERY year hanging around until she didn't need to keep the old returns anymore. Of course, this is not acceptable since she wants to get rid of the old machine. Also, she's not sure where her TurboTax 2007 installation CD is and (of course) we couldn't find any info on downloading TurboTax 2007 from the Intuit website.

So, what we figured out (and here is the tip) is to save the completed tax returns in PDF format. This way, she's not burning paper printing them and the PDF files can be e-mailed or printed as desired. She won't need to keep older copies of TurboTax laying around and the PDF files should archive nicely on CD or DVD or whatever.

If you get in the habit of saving PDF copies of your completed TurboTax prepared returns, you might be able to save yourself grief later on if you need to refer back to those returns.

Sorry for making this so long winded. 

Peace...


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## cybertech (Apr 16, 2002)

I would also suggest not saving these to your primary drive as they will contain PII Data which could be stolen if you allow your machine to become infected! Save those files in a safe place like an external drive that is not turned on all the time or better yet burn them to a CD/DVD.


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

Excellent point! Thanks for mentioning that. 

Peace...


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## JohnWill (Oct 19, 2002)

I always save my returns as PDF files, but it's a good tip.


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## cybertech (Apr 16, 2002)

Same here. I actually save them twice. Once as submitted and then once with *everything* in case I have to do any research.


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## vicks (Jan 31, 2005)

We also do as cyertech does. Keep copies on external medium.
Vicks


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