Product Reviews

There are more reasons to have a suite of office applications in your home than we can count. If you need to write a letter, make a list of your valuables for insurance purposes or keep track of your finances, an office suite can help you. Thing is, the kind of office software you have at work - Microsoft Office, for instance - can cost as much as 500 quid. Fortunately, Microsoft has the answer: Works Suite.

Works Suite 2004 is a set of office applications designed for the home. It includes the powerful word processor Word 2002, so you can create professionally formatted letters and other documents, but has cut-down versions of the other office applications. These make up Microsoft's cheaper office suite, Works. Don't be deceived, though: while Works is simple compared with Office, it's more than powerful enough for the kind of work you'll do at home. As well as basic maths functions, the spreadsheet provides lots of ready-made formulas for carrying out fairly complex calculations. You can, for instance, work out how long you'll have to save to accumulate a given sum, when taking into account the rate of compound interest. It's only when you need to work with scientific or statistical data that you reach the program's limits. Works also includes a calendar for tracking your appointments.

All of Works Suite's programs are easily accessible through the Task Launcher.

As well as the bundle of office applications, Works Suite contains several other programs. Picture-It! is an image editing application for retouching photos. Its controls and options are non-standard (which might annoy people who are used to other photo editing applications), but Picture-It! is surprisingly powerful and versatile. Of the program's new features, the best is Mini Lab, which allows you to edit several photos simultaneously. AutoRoute 2004 is our current Top 50 route-finding software. Not only will it plan your journey from its database of maps, it can also point you in the direction of stop-offs such as hotels and restaurants. Similarly, Microsoft Money is our Top 50 financial suite. It's simple to use, and allows you to track your finances, using online banking. It's also supplemented by lots of online advice and updates. As if this weren't enough, you also get a cut-down version of our current Top 50 PC encyclopedia, Microsoft Encarta, which contains over 40,000 articles.

If you already have Works Suite 2003, there's nothing here that warrants an upgrade - the core components (Works 7.0 and Word 2002) haven't changed. If, on the other hand, you don't already have an office suite - and you don't need the flexibility of Microsoft's full-strength spreadsheet and database programs - this is the one to buy.