Page Plus has reached version 7, so logic dictates that maker Serif must be doing something right. However, unlike some of the professional-level products here, Page Plus is a home-user tool, offering a semi-professional range of features but concentrating primarily on documents such as certificates and greeting cards.

To this end the program starts with a colourful wizard which asks what you'd like to do. You can use a Page Wizard, which asks you both what document you want to produce and what you'd like to put in it, before going off and producing this to a preset design, or you can start from scratch by defining just the document type (such as A4 or poster). There's also the option of taking a tour to find out what the program is capable of, although this is merely a text and pictures walkthrough and not an interactive tutorial.

Once you're using the program the home user credentials are hard to miss and, in fact, can become pervasive. A good example of this is when, in our test document, we wanted to draw a text box and fill it with a red tint. It took us some time to work out how this is done because Page Plus assumes you want a colourful gradated or conical fill, of which several are available on a swatch palette. If you merely want a common or garden solid fill, you must right click on the text box, select Fill from the context sensitive menu, and select Solid Fill from the dialog box - convoluted, to say the least.

Serif also steers you towards producing fairly trivial stuff such as greeting cards, calendars and certificates. There's no wizard that guides you through producing a newsletter or homemade newspaper, for example, despite the fact the program easily has the capability. On the other hand, Page Plus is able to create Web sites, albeit ones that rely heavily upon CSS layers, making them incompatible with older browsers.

The moral of the story is that if you stick to what Page Plus is good at then you can't go wrong. The Schemes palette lets you drag and drop entire colour schemes onto a document, making designing a page incredibly easy and fun, and we particularly liked the ChangeBar palette which lets you alter text spacing, size, leading and kerning live on screen using sliders. This is something that the big boys of Quark and Adobe might take note of.

We were fairly satisfied with Page Plus 7. We managed to make the program crash once when trying to use Print Preview without a printer driver installed, and the lack of a decent grid to align objects to is a pain. But if you don't expect too much of it then Page Plus is terrific.