[Fsf-friends] Income tax e-filing is all about editing in MS-Excel?

[Shyam | ശ്യാം കാരനാട്ട് | Karanattu]

Hi,
May be this is a bit old issue, but I just saw it now, that the e-filing
of income tax returns is all about filling things in MS-Excel.
The site offers .xls files[1] with macros and all that, which has the
specified forms of filing the data in MS-Excel. and uploading it.

The ideal way to respond would be with the .ods files with all those
things as in .xls . Now the .xls files are opening correctly on
openoffice and hopefully it should be ok to convert it to .ods. But it
would be great if some one familiar with the tax forms can check and
make sure .ods too works fine. The site offers the schema too[2]. Even
if we could convert those to .ods successfully, the government should be
ready to accept the .ods files too. I haven't yet checked the whole
process of efiling.  


Has this been on discussion before? the site is offering "Excel Utility"
and "Pdf Utility" even for the Assessment year 2007-2008. Also i heard
the last date for this year 09-10 is july end or so.. pretty late it
seems.

Moreover i see the "Pdf Utility" given there(for eg:[3]) is even
un-viewable on all the pdf viewers i have. As i open it says to use a
later version of adobe pdf viewer. 

Hope to know more about anything that can be done.


Regards
Shyam K



[1]-- https://incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/portal/individual_huf.do
[2]-- https://incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/portal/advanced_users.do
[3]-- https://incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in/portal/downloads07-08/itr/ITR2_Version1.2.pdf