Microsoft Office 2003

Conditional formatting is on a par with that offered by OpenOffice, running to three variables. This should be plenty; if you need more, it points to a poorly organised document rather than a limitation of the application. However, where OpenOffice used style-based conditional formatting, Excel lets you define formats on-the-fly. This is easier for the uninitiated to understand, but could lead to inconsistencies in your results.

The auto-formatting styles are subdued and businesslike, which is a welcome relief after the busy razzmatazz of some of the styles in Quattro Pro (WordPerfect Office). It's also easy to create list-based tables that will mean most users can happily do without Access.

Arrays can be easily turned into drop-down lists, in which the cell at the top of each column is converted into an index. Clicking on it brings up a list of the variables used in the columns below, which can then be used to narrow down the range of data on display. There's also a custom entry on the drop-downs, allowing you to specify that the range should include, among other things, variables 'equal to or greater than' a specified value.

This is a quick and dirty solution to data sorting, and as such has a few limitations. If your opening column is the days of the week, for example, they'll be rearranged into alphabetical order in the drop-down, so Friday comes first rather than last.

POWERPOINT

PowerPoint usurped the OHP and acetate - as well as Lotus Freelance Graphics - several years ago and is now the default choice for presentations. This is as much down to the speed with which you can create slides as it is to the assurance that you could send your completed files to almost any workspace and someone there will be able to read them.

Setting it to display slide designs and then clicking through them immediately applies the selected style to your current slide. This isn't a simple matter of switching the background image; it reformats the text style and even position of standard elements on each slide.

The styles themselves are somewhat hit and miss, but if you stick to the more business-like designs you should get away with using the PowerPoint defaults.

The view can be set to greyscale or black and white to emulate a laser print, which will help to diagnose potential handout problems before you get too far with your design, while a new 'package for CD' feature burns a self-running version of your presentation to disc. It can then be played back on PCs running Windows 98 or later, even if they don't have PowerPoint installed. This doesn't rival OpenOffice's ability to save your presentations as Flash files for online use, but it's a welcome addition nonetheless.

The integrated charting tools fall short of those offered by WordPerfect Office, as the datasheet is a dumb table, rather than a cut-down spreadsheet capable of parsing formulas. Considering Microsoft owns Excel and should be able to provide the necessary links through Windows, this is disappointing.

OUTLOOK

Of all the packages in the suite, it's perhaps Outlook that has moved on the most since Office XP. For starters, it has a whole new look and feel, with the default view being a side-by-side layout. Your emails now more closely mimic their printed equivalents in the new reading pane, while the inbox itself can be expanded and contracted so that only emails sent or received within a specified timeframe are on display. Better still, they can be organised as a series of threads, like entries in a newsgroup, which simplifies the task of tracking an extended email conversation.