Let's make it clear: SmartSuite does pretty much everything that Microsoft Office 2000 can plus a whole lot more, but costs just the same. The suite includes four business essentials: word processor (Word Pro), spreadsheet (1-2-3), ...

Forget any preconceptions you might have about WordPerfect, once the king of word processors in the days of DOS. Today's WordPerfect Office 2000 is a fresh, fast and very well-featured suite of applications and utilities. And ...

Now you have a third choice between expensive 'office' suites and cheap but under-featured 'works' packages. Ability Office 2000 admirably fills the gap in the market with well-featured and professional-quality programs, all for £50. The suite ...

Serif PagePlus 6.0 is a publishing tool for the home or business. The program has many design shortcuts for the amateur or professional user and excels at making complicated tasks look easy. Despite this, it comes ...

Considerable interest has been shown in the development of the Linux operating system as a viable alternative to Windows in the commercial sector. A substantial range of software is already available for users, but it's only ...

From the number of folk out there using one Sage product or another, you'd think that Sage was the only player in the budget accounting field. It isn't, but at the last count the company had ...

When Lotus originally launched Organizer (or Organiser, if you want to Anglicise the name), users and critics alike were impressed with its interface, which resembled the popular paper-based personal organisers of the time. Five incarnations later, ...

OCR, or optical character recognition, is one of life's disappointments. Like unwrapping a solid, heavy Christmas present and finding eight pairs of socks inside, using OCR with the expectation that what was printed on the paper ...

The early speech recognition tools required discrete speech. This meant that each individual word had to be spoken clearly on its own, with a space between each word. Continuous speech recognition was introduced a couple of ...

This latest version of Power Translator Pro represents a significant leap forward in language translation software. This advance has been made possible by using new techniques which improve greatly upon the old method of performing a ...

There has been a large number of major obstacles faced by the PC speech recognition and dictation industry, including price, accuracy, installation training time, ease of use and the quality of the microphone you speak into. ...

HotFax MessageCenter 3.0 can match TalkWorks Pro's feature specification largely point for point and can even boast some exclusive extras, like 3D fax formatting, which uses a digital coding of the fax document to squeeze a ...

Symantec has a strong reputation for delivering high quality utility software; numbering Norton Utilities and WinFax among its many products. TalkWorks Pro 2.0 can be considered as an extended version of WinFax Pro 9.0, with voice ...

Information is great. It gives you knowledge, power and confidence. As long as it's organised. If not, searching for an important fact can be like the proverbial haystack and needle situation. That's bad enough with a ...

Anyone who's bought a scanner and attempted to use it to convert printed documents into editable text will no doubt have been sorely disappointed. The majority of the 'lite' optical character recognition products supplied with scanners ...

RedBox is, in essence, a personal information manager. It incorporates a Calendar, To Do list, Planner, Address book, Notepad, Anniversary reminder and report-writer, all packaged into a compact little interface that even a monkey could use ...

While workgroup messaging and database solutions such as Lotus Notes are very useful tools for larger corporations, smaller companies can rarely justify the cost of such products, since they don't need all the advanced functionality provided. ...

With the office suite market now whittled down to just three major players - Corel, Lotus and Microsoft - some business users are making decisions based solely on their recognition of a company name. That's not ...

Fancy keeping in touch with business colleagues in Belorussia? Or pen-pals from Poland? Or perhaps school-friends from Serbia? It's not as easy as it may seem, since the PC has never been particularly good at handling ...

Not one of our more timely reviews, this, since IT Reviews didn't even exist when Office 97 SBE2.0 was launched. But we've got a copy now, and it's worth a look because this is the second ...