Deductions & credits

Well it's nice to know I'm not the only one. 

I don't like making everything "various". The IRS wants it listed by country, I assume that is required by the tax law. The purpose of 1116 is to limit the deduction in proportion to the proportion of the country income compared to total income. So making everything "various" violates that, and I expect, the law. That's not something Intuit should be comfortable with.

Like you I did get things entered using the forms mode. But I didn't have to make any fake 1099-Divs. I added additional Form 1116s. You do this by choosing "open form" in the menu (F6 is the shortcut). Then choose the form you want (I used the search box in the screenshot below since the list is long) and click "open form". 

In the box that comes up (shown below) you can choose an existing form to edit or add a new one. When you add a new one you then have to use the "quickzoom" to the worksheet located near the top. The worksheet is where you can input data that will carry into the form. As you can see I have 3 forms in my return.

It should be easier. In retrospect I'm not even sure how I found this. (I should have bought a lottery ticket that day.) But the whole Foreign tax credit could be easier: the data it really needs input are the country, amount of income, and amount of tax paid. Then the program could add the amounts when the country is the same and do all the calculations and add the necessary forms. 

Before last year I used  a competing program and while I could get the data in using the forms mode (though it wasn't easy) it refused to e-file if there was more than one Form 1116. So it was a relief when I tried TurboTax and it e-filed. They could make it a lot better if they wanted to, but  we are too small a constituency.

Of course the best solution would be for Congress to raise the amount that requires Form 1116. It's been $300 for as long as I can remember and $300 just isn't what it used to be.