Labs

Let's cut straight to the chase and herald Works Suite 2005's headline product: Word 2002. That's the same one you'll find in Office XP. If a complete office suite is overkill for your needs, and you can do without the more esoteric features of Word 2003, then this inclusion makes Works Suite a very sensible option indeed.

It's bundled with the 2005 editions of Encarta Standard, AutoRoute and Money, as well as Works 8 and Photo Premium 10. Taken as a whole, this is less an office suite and more a home productivity package, helping you learn, navigate and manage your money. What's missing is a competent spreadsheet, an advanced database or any kind of presentation tool: business users beware.

Before you write it off, though, consider the fact that Word 2003 sells for £171 on its own (£146 exc VAT). Works Suite costs £110 (£93 exc VAT). So, if you're a writing-oriented business user who just can't bring yourself to abandon Microsoft in favour of our Labs Winner, OpenOffice, this is a cost-effective way to get your hands on the market leader at volume prices, without buying volume quantities.

Microsoft Money has established itself as the standard for online banking. It downloads statements from 22 British banks in standard OFX, OFC and QIF format, but is blind to some of the big players, including Smile (Co-op), Virgin Money, Halifax and Egg. You can set it to operate in background banking mode, which will continually download your account details and relevant financial news when your PC is online, although at this time you'd be hard-pressed to find a UK bank that supports the service. A word of warning here, though: the licence agreement clearly states that some of the online features will work for only two years. Downloading and importing statements is excluded from this clause, but you may find some share-tracking or finance-planning tools disappear by late 2006.

Everything is integrated into the Works Task Launcher, so that common tasks are added to your programs, with 'Start Microsoft Money' being supplemented by options to look up your balance, sort out your budget or pay your bills. Likewise, you can launch AutoRoute from here via

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a dedicated route-planning pane, or skip straight to the pop-up for looking up place names rather than be faced with a map of the whole of Europe.

The range of templates bundled with Word has been skewed towards the home user, with presets for shopping lists, care-giver instructions and seasonal greetings cards. Its only nod to business users is the option to fire up Word's Mail-Merge Wizard straight from the Launcher, which is no great loss as most pro users would skip the Launcher anyway.

The bundled encyclopedia, Encarta Standard 2005, is the best you can buy unless you opt for the full-blown reference suite. It trumped the competition several years ago by dint of the fact that navigating its massive library is so easy.

Encarta also has a dedicated team of researchers putting it together. Recent updates include the death of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Chechnian elections in September, and the succession of Jose Manuel Durao Barroso to the top job at the European Commission.

Lastly, Photo Premium 10 provides simple layer-based photo editing. It isn't going to rival Photoshop, but is considerably more accomplished than Ability PhotoPaint Studio. Everything is non-destructive until you commit your changes to the image, and with simple tools to remove red eye and adjust hue and saturation it will meet the needs of first-time digital camera owners.

We were disappointed that there's no easy way to save an image for use on the Web in Photo Premium, although it does have simple compression tools for sending your work by email. These use plain English descriptions for file sizes, so rather than pick 50 per cent JPEG compression of 16-bit GIF, you'd select small web view, thumbnail or large email view and be given instant feedback on how long each would take to download.

It's bundled with Picture It! Library 10, which is a shameless land-grab on Adobe Photoshop Album's territory. This will search your drives for images and then index them according to date and keywords, which will significantly speed up the task of finding your favourites, and is well integrated with Photo Premium, so editing whatever it finds takes nothing more than a couple of right-clicks.

Works Suite may not be pitched at business users, but that doesn't mean they should immediately pass it by. Certainly for anyone working from home, who can track the family finances in Money and whose kids can make best use of Encarta, it represents something of a bargain: remember you're getting the full version of Word XP and a decent productivity suite in Works. Before splashing out, though, consider the limitations of Works' basic database and whether you will need the power of Excel at some future point, in which case this may be a false economy.