Publisher 2003

Microsoft Publisher, like FrontPage, is pitched at occasional users who want to produce high-impact and professional design as quickly as possible.

To enable this, Publisher has always provided a wizard-based approach to get its users off to a flying start. In this new version, the ever-present handholding provided by the central task pane has been redesigned, with a new simplified Start Panel providing drill-down access to project types. This is split into print, web and themed sets. These are particularly useful for businesses, as they provide wide ranges of projects, each of which share the same house style. The number of themes on offer has been boosted to 45 by the addition of ten new master sets, so you should be able to find one that appeals and can then customise it with the Colour Schemes and Font Schemes panes to ensure your choice of house style is unique.

As well as the new master sets, Publisher provides a wide range of new publication presets. New project types include personal stationery sets, and DVD and CD cases bring the tally up to more than a million possible combinations of verses, layouts, colours and designs. And, if that's not enough, Publisher 2003 also promises access to further downloadable projects over time.

Publisher 2003 also moves into two entirely new areas of design: data-driven and email publishing. Using the new Email and Catalog Merge Wizard, you can combine pictures and text from a data source to produce anything from an address book through to a product catalogue. Alternatively, you may use the same wizard to manage an email mailshot, with Publisher 2003 offering six HTML-based email publication types matching each of the 45 master styles. Microsoft is pushing this as a handy way of keeping in touch with your customers, but be wary - unless used carefully, the results are more likely to be perceived as unasked-for and download-heavy spam.

Publisher 2003 also offers a number of Word-inspired design features to help you fine-tune your projects. The changes are partly cosmetic, such as the rationalisation of former dialogs into more familiar Format | Paragraph and Bullets and Numbering commands, but there's also more control over line and paragraph breaks, such as the crucial widow and orphan control. Publisher 2003's new task-pane based Find and Replace command has also been revamped to work across multiple stories.

Catching up with Word is hardly pushing back the boundaries of DTP, but Publisher 2003 does add some more advanced design capabilities of its own. By setting up baseline guides, it's now possible to ensure that text aligns across columns. You can also add empty picture frames and select objects behind textboxes - two minor changes that make a big practical difference. The most welcome advances are the support for multiple master page backgrounds and the ability to drag and drop the page icons on the status bar to reorder your publication.

Publisher 2003 also adds an enhanced Design Checker to spot potential problems, as well as an improved Graphics Manager task pane for checking embedded graphics. You can also convert from spot colour to process and vice versa, and convert RGB colours to CMYK. Most important of all, Publisher can create CMYK-composite PostScript files ready for colour separation. The obvious and telling omission, however, is the inability to output directly to Acrobat PDF format, which these days is the standard for simple and reliable commercial output.

Print is one side of the equation, but Publisher is unique among DTP packages in that it takes web publishing just as seriously. Alongside the existing dedicated tools and automatic repurposing, Publisher 2003 provides a new Website Builder Wizard. This lets you specify what you want your site to do and then sets up the pages to help you achieve it. Using the Insert | Page command, you can always add extra pages such as calendars, FAQs and so on. Further improvements include more control over navigation bars, the ability to quickly name your pages and support for incremental uploading so only those pages that have been changed need to be posted to your server.