With a licence agreement of barely 100 words and a price tag of absolutely zero, it's surprising that OpenOffice hasn't enjoyed more success. Actually, scratch that; as good as the previous version was, there were unhelpful ...

Fighting head-to-head with Microsoft in the premium price office suite arena, as it has done for some time, Corel's latest suite makes it clear where its priorities lie pretty much from the start. Screaming 'Microsoft compatible' ...

Summarize is one of a number of products from Corpora aimed at helping you sift through information. If your job or hobby involves wading through a lot of text, its claim to produce 'accurate summaries of ...

There are only two desktop publishing programs designed for the masses, rather than professional graphic designers. Microsoft's Publisher is set firmly in the small business arena, while Serif tries to embrace home, business and semi-professional use ...

Works Suite 2006 comprises six products: Works 8, Word 2002, Encarta 2005, Digital Image 2006, AutoRoute Essentials 2006 and Money 2006. There are smaller extras, too, such as Pocket Streets for Pocket PC and Smartphone. Those ...

If you've ever thought of going on that Alan Sugar TV show for budding entrepreneurs, but were scared that he might chew you up and spit you out at the first barrier, then maybe it's time ...

Not all of us are dead clever. Not all of us are tri-lingual masters of the spoken word. After a few pints, some of us can barely speak the one language. Luckily, the world of the ...

WordPerfect is an intimidating title for a program. It sounds like the sort of word processor that only Shakespearian types should be using; those who can craft perfect sentences and paragraphs. As opposed to journalistic monkeys ...

At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking that Student 2006 marks an express act of generosity on the part of Microsoft. After all, for just shy of £60 it does initially seem that you ...

The bane of most medium to large companies' existence is the need to keep abreast of all the compliance demands made on it by changing legislation and improvements in business efficiency. Allied to this headache is ...

I well remember my first experiences of speech-to-text software. The long training periods with new applications teaching them to recognise my voice, which because it was so different from an American voice seemed to present an ...

We'll make no secret of the fact that we like Intuit's QuickBooks software. We've used it for running our own accounts in the past and we were impressed by the enhancements implemented in recent incarnations of ...

There's an old adage that runs along the lines of never judging a book by its cover. Usually, it refers to something that looks an awful lot better than it actually is. In this case, quite ...

If you often need to print documents in unusual formats, then ClickBook might be what you are looking for. But let's be clear from the start; it is not a design and print application. The design ...

The Portable Document Format, PDF to its friends, has arguably been Adobe's finest gift to the computing world. Yet now that its PDF creation package, Acrobat, has reached the seventh incarnation in its comparably brief life-span, ...

The number of speech recognition systems readily available for general use has been dropping over the years, and with IBM saying it's no longer actively developing ViaVoice, ScanSoft's Dragon Naturally Speaking is the only real player. ...

Reviewing Microsoft Works Suite 2005 is, for us, like visiting Harrods in the January sale. We can't afford 95% of their distinctly overpriced products for the rest of the year, but when they're benevolent enough to ...

Quicken 2004 XG, as with Microsoft's Money 2004, is a product waiting for the banking world to catch up with it. Its aim of getting you to effectively manage your finances has stood it in good ...

Adobe currently markets three editions of its Acrobat software for creating PDF documents, the cheapest being Acrobat Elements which costs £50 per seat as long as you purchase a minimum licence for 1,000 seats. ScanSoft's PDF ...

Ability Office (last reviewed here) has, for many years now, been pitched as the low-cost alternative to Microsoft Office. With a sub-£50 retail price, its suite of programs has always matched Microsoft's market leader in terms ...