Microsoft Works 8

We were particularly impressed at how easy it was to use. On launching you're presented with a wizard for adding fields to a new blank database, with a set of radio buttons giving you a quick way of defining content types, which extend to serial numbers. The Report Creator is equally easy to understand, and takes you through a series of six steps for creating and formatting your results. It's like simple conditional formatting.

Fourteen sample databases complete with well-designed forms have been bundled, and cover such tasks as recording recipes, indexing CD collections and keeping track of your home inventory for insurance purposes.

Finally, the word processor is surprisingly versatile. Although it didn't manage to retain all of the formatting of our Word 2000 manual it did make a good stab at replicating the layout of the original, with text margins retained and many of the graphics in the correct positions. Those that overlapped each other, though, were missing. An embedded chart remained editable with a double-click; doing so brought up a simple data entry table like the one found in Word. Unfortunately, it misaligned some of the embedded images where they were supposed to float to the right of the body text, and it straightened skewed pictures.

Works offers a fair return for your money if you work in the way it wants you to. However, its price needs to be closer to £30 than £50 if people are going to be persuaded away from the free OpenOffice alternative.