Labs

Twenty quid for a word processor, a spreadsheet and a photo editor seems like good value. Well, as it turns out, it's not bad, but we wouldn't part with our own money for it. The spellchecker works fine, as does basic formatting; everything's arranged in a straightforward way. On the other hand, some features just don't work as they should. The 'format painter',

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for instance, applied only the attributes of a text style, not the style itself. So, when we created a table of contents, all the section headings we'd created with the format painter were missed, and those sections weren't included in the table. The 'track changes' function didn't differentiate between deletions and insertions, which was confusing.

The spreadsheet opened our Excel document, keeping all the formatting apart (surprise, surprise) from the grouping of cells. It coped with basic maths without any problems, and with most of the more advanced formulas such as conditional formatting, adding and subtracting dates, converting weights and so on. There's also a good autosum function that makes life easy for anyone who wants to do maths but doesn't know the formula syntax. Subtracting one date from another worked fine, as long as neither of the dates fell before 1900.

This isn't a terrible package, but others beat it.