Product Reviews

Think 'productivity' rather than 'office', and you'll know what Works Suite is for. It's a bundle of six applications that, while not essential to everyday life, certainly make it easier.

There's AutoRoute for mapping, Money for planning, Encarta for learning, Digital Image for tweaking your photos, plus a full copy of Word 2002 for letter writing. That's on top of the basic Works 8 (available for £36 inc VAT), the highlights of which include integrating multiple calendar and contacts folders into Outlook Express, plus a basic database and spreadsheet.

The suite life

It's all fronted by the Suite launcher, primarily designed to help you navigate the applications on the basis of need rather than function. It then drops you into the most appropriate piece of software for the job at hand. Tell it you want to travel, and it offers you AutoRoute to find places, Word to write a travel journal, the spreadsheet to see what you can afford, or MSN to book a hotel. This last option is where a few doubts creep in as MSN permeates Works Suite, in places feeling like a sales tool. Money is dotted with opportunities to compare credit cards or buy insurance, and AutoRoute tempts you with features that are available only if you pay for an upgrade. Even so, there's still a tremendous amount here for your cash.

The spreadsheet option foregoes the complexity of Excel in favour of a single-page spreadsheet that understands neither conditional formatting or grouping. It's also limited to a little over 3.2 million cells, which is sufficient for most, but way short of the 15 million of both Excel and the free OpenOffice 2, (the latter is included on our cover disc this month). Works is, of course, aimed at home use, but the spreadsheet's inability to open anything more complex than a solitary sheet of numbers and sums is limiting, and means that it shouldn't be used to edit spreadsheets created at work using Excel - saving them back out could all too easily rob the originals of their most useful features.

Encarta

In the age of the 830,000-article Wikipedia.org, Encarta's 36,000 entries sound somewhat pokey. The lush entries of previous releases have also been sobered up for the 2006 Standard Edition, which is now dominated by smart typography and a fading task pane.

There's plenty of multimedia for the taking, although it could be better integrated into the main body of work to great effect. Even entries that should be swamped with attractive visuals, such as Pixar or the table of the world's tallest buildings, are tidy, text-only affairs, while in other places the choice of image is poorly thought through. Search for Microsoft and you'll find the same squinty-eyed shot of Bill Gates that the encyclopedia has used for the past few years. Hunt for Apple, and the picture of its founders is so tightly cropped that Steve Jobs, the current CEO and the man who brought us the iPod (which receives just 29 words before mention of a mysterious iMac GF, which we presume should be G5), is only revealed once you expand the picture.

These complaints aside, if you want to use Encarta as a reliable starting point, it's second to none. Copy and pasting applies the proper references to the document in which you use the work, while buying this bundle also gives you free access to the Premium online service for use from any browser, as well as regular updates. On installing, we updated immediately, to receive obituaries for Rosa Parks and Ronnie Barker, both of whom had died within the past few weeks. It's hit-and-miss, though: for instance, we could find no mention of Daniel Craig, who was recently confirmed as the next James Bond.

Encarta's incorporation of the AutoRoute engine is also a masterstroke, allowing you to pan around the world, clicking towns and reading the associated articles. There's no denying that Encarta remains the best installable (not to mention reliable) encyclopedia we've tested for many years, and it kept us entertained clicking from entry to entry for a good two hours.

Autoroute

AutoRoute has garnered an Essentials suffix to indicate its trimmed-down nature, yet still covers 27 countries. It remains highly competent and far more flexible than an online route planner, but some of the more advanced functions, such as spoken GPS directions, are missing. Despite this, the button to switch on the voice is still present. Pressing it suggests you might like to upgrade. The same goes for the driving guidance pane.

However, it does have an excellent database of neighbourhood information. We checked out our surrounding area and were impressed by the accuracy with which it placed local garages and museums, and the fact that supplementary information like phone numbers was included on the record for each. It did miss out our closest pub, though, and got confused by the cash machine at the post office, which dispenses cash for branchless Internet banks. Each one was listed individually, making it look like we had 22 branches within half a mile.

Route planning itself is fast and flexible, and it's easy

The directions it gives are easy to follow and, because of the way it collapses down helpful but not essential entries - such as 'At Exit 10 stay on M20' - also concise and suited to solo driving.

Digital image

Digital Image 2006, the suite's photography application, comprises two distinct parts - a library tool and an editor - and both feel like well-established, mature additions. Library organises your photos, arranging them according to editable metadata variables. A handy parameter painter lets you apply common variables to batches of pictures with a single click, while a rating system allows you to group them by personal preference, as well as the time and place they were taken. This is clearly a play for Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition, a free download from www.adobe.co.uk

Microsoft's professional photo-printing service is picky, though: clicking the link threw up our default browser, but as this was Firefox and not IE we couldn't go further. Manually pasting the link into IE got us one stage further, but it too fell over because it doesn't include the necessary ActiveX controller for picking photos. Once installed, we moved onto the next step, but it again collapsed because of another missing component: 'ActiveX federated upload control from MCL Software Service Inc'. Only after installing that could we add our pictures to a basket, where they were priced up in euros, not pounds. All things considered, we recommend using www.photobox.co.uk instead. It isn't integrated into Digital Image, but we prefer being able to upload pictures without installing browser control, and we appreciate prices in pounds and pence too.

Fortunately, the separate photo editor is very good. Its extensive range of one-click fixes really does improve your images with the minimum of fuss, and there's even a camera phone auto-fix to brighten and enhance low-resolution images. Each tool drops you into a new task pane, isolating the sliders and dialogs required for the job in hand, saving you the chore of hunting through myriad palettes.

Admittedly, some filters take a wooden-mallet approach to fine-tuning. Auto-colour fixing all too readily desaturated a night-time shot of streaming traffic at the Coliseum. Macromedia Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop, on the other hand, preserved the levels of this more or less perfectly exposed shot. Switching to a daytime photo with high contrasts, though, we actually preferred the Digital Image auto-fix to that performed by Photoshop. So overall, it's a thumbs-up for Digital Image, despite the fact it was missing the Photo Story tool for making narrated slide shows. The Help file explains that this is available only by paying for an upgrade.

Money

And so to the suite's last great element: Money. If ever there was a piece of software that responds well to frequent grooming, this is it. It needs to be fed regular updates about your financial situation, so it's fortunate that many UK banks provide OFX or QIF statements for direct import, although Barclaycard, Egg, Cahoot, The One Account and others, including one of our test banks, Smile, don't. Money's link to LloydsTSB, our other test account, was invalid. It sent us to the .co.uk domain, which refused to display its contents. Manually switching to the .com address fixed it, and once we had it set up we could indeed log on to our account from within the Money interface.

Money is peppered with links to MSN: you log on using your Passport and it hooks into financial news so it can display a constantly updated record of your stock portfolio, all of which is good. Its help system could do with a refresh: as a search on the term 'ISA' returned no hits, so we were left to work out for ourselves whether this should be added as a standard bank account or an investment.

An hour of gathering and entering data was all we needed to get our accounts in order and, indeed, discover that we were a couple of hundred pounds better off than we thought, which pays for the software itself. It was also enough for us to think about moving our accounts to a bank that supported statement downloads once we'd seen how easy they were to use. You can check whether your own bank supports Money here: http://money.msn.co.uk/MyMoney/MicrosoftMoney/online/fininst/default.asp

Conclusions

While there are a few too many chops and upgrade nags for an unqualified thumbs-up, Works Suite still walks off with a Recommended award. As a starter suite, it's the perfect combination: the inclusion of a full version of Word 2002 is a real bonus and Money undoubtedly a star turn. For those novices yet to find their feet with hunting down web-based encyclopedias, maps and printing services, it's a guaranteed pleaser.

If you're after an office suite, though, look elsewhere. We recommend Microsoft's own Office suite or OpenOffice 2, depending on your budget and needs, with Works Suite 2006 on hand to organise the more entertaining aspects of your life. In terms of value, sourcing each application individually, including Word 2002 for £39 from an Amazon marketplace trader, we had a bottom line of £231. The fact that you can buy the OEM version (albeit without a printed manual or fancy packaging) of Works Suite 8 for just £54 speaks for itself.