Product Reviews

The arduous task of choosing the perfect greeting card is made worse by the amount of money they cost. Making your own might sound like the cheapskate option, but it's more convenient when you need a card in an emergency and allows you to add a personal touch that friends and family are sure to appreciate.

Greeting Card Factory Deluxe 6 will pay for itself in no time. Buy packs of blank cards in bulk and you'll keep the cost to a minimum. Folded A5 cards cost as little as 25p each and are printable by most inkjet printers.

After you've installed the program, a wizard guides you through

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setting up your printer, so you know which way to feed in the card for printing both front and back. It's a shame it doesn't warn you to change settings in your printer driver to configure it for printing on card, as well as the size of the media.

Once you're happy with the test prints, you can get on with designing cards. There's a neat template browser with thumbnails of the 22,000 designs. Thumbnails are zoomable, so you can check the text and finer details of each design before opening it. There are cards for just about every occasion but if you find one's missing, it's simple enough to insert your own images or photos along with text in any one of the 1,000 supplied fonts.

You can print envelopes and edit photos using the built-in photo editor. There are plenty of other project types to choose from, including invitations, signs, postcards, gift tags, calendars and even party hats. There's also an option to send e-cards or burn designs to CD. Finally, there's a useful address book so you can keep your contacts in one place and set reminders for birthdays and anniversaries.

Greeting Card Factory Deluxe 6 is great fun to use and is sure to save you money.