Corel Print Office 2000

Whether it's a brochure, a single picture or a whole website, Corel Print Office 2000 has the tools to help.

Print Office is a surprisingly versatile package, and while it may not appeal to demanding business users it has more than enough to offer the small office or home user. The package is split into four: Print Office, Web Designer, Photo House and Central.

Central is an electronic organiser for keeping track of your contacts and appointments - it can be set to start running every time you start up your PC. It shows up as a vertical bar running down the edge of the screen, displaying today's diary events and any tasks you have to do - buttons at the bottom give quick access to the address book, calendar and card file.

The address book integrates well with the Windows address book built by Outlook Express, while Central's card file is designed to hold similar, although far more comprehensive, personal data. The calendar can be localised and includes databases of national holidays for a number of countries, including the UK. It also drops an alarm facility next to the system clock at the bottom of your screen, letting you set reminders quickly and easily without having to navigate the Windows 'Start' menu.

Photo House 5 is similar to the Adobe PhotoDeluxe package (Computeractive, issue 48) and helps you to organise and optimise images. The easy-to-follow menu is in plain English and has a wide range of realistic drawing tools for enhancing your work. We particularly liked the page curl tool that makes it look as though the corner of your image is curling up - the range of options for this function alone was far wider than we have seen anywhere else. You can even compress your images so that they download quickly from a website and then preview the difference this makes before saving them.

Corel Web Designer, meanwhile, is a simple page design package that has some surprisingly effective tools. Right-clicking on anything on your page brings up a menu tailored to that object - we found the table creation tool especially effective, as it lets you draw your table on a grid, just like in Microsoft Word.

If you have already built a site you can open it into Web Designer - even if it is already on the internet - and once you've finished, it will take care of the fiddly process of uploading it to your site. We couldn't make the option to create a page from a template work because there were no templates in the menu it showed us, but that was our only gripe. For techies there's the option to edit the page as raw HTML code, which can be useful when you know more about web programming and want to make specific changes, but you can happily work without it.

There are plenty of drop-down menus to set the font type and size, and it will even handle style sheets, a fairly new way of specifying what all your text should look like without having to format it at the start of every paragraph. Setting up web page frames can fool even the most experienced programmer, so it was good to see that Web Designer took care of this too, walking us through the process one step at a time.

All of these three packages feed into Print Office itself, which opens with a graphical menu showing the kinds of projects on which you can work, including CVs, invoices, faxes and flyers. You can select the type of document you want to create from the supplied templates. The main menu is jargon free, with options like 'add things' and 'change things' and when it comes to tweaking the appearance of the text on your page you're never short of choices. Just about everything from rotating to adding a drop shadow is at your disposal.

Features:

Web design without the coding

Document templates

Image editing

Optimise photos for the internet

Address book

Calendar and task list

Reminder alarms

Easy page layout tools

» Verdict: You'll have to look hard to find a more extensive and easier to use computer design tool for beginners than this.