There are two good reasons why PagePlus has made it as far as this, its eighth incarnation. Reason one; it's far cheaper than some of its competitors (PageMaker, InDesign, etc.). And secondly, it's far easier to use. This new edition treads a delicate balance between keeping things as user-friendly as possible while adding some sophisticated new features, and it just about pulls it off.

The core of the program is still fairly similar to previous versions. It's a desktop publishing package, driven - should you so wish - by wizards, which easily help you put together projects as diverse as flyers, newsletters and web pages. It was irritating that we had to constantly refer to the CD in order to import these templates, mind. However, having selected one of them, help is always at hand on the right of the screen. This really helps you get through the learning curve that, with traditional DTP packages, is pretty steep. It has to be said, though, that the printed manual is not so useful.

When it comes to working with your project, that takes centre place on the screen, with toolbars and menus to the top and left. These are quite straightforward to work your way around, and well-written help is also on hand. Instead of forcing you to set up picture and text boxes in the way that higher-end applications often do, PagePlus allows you to directly place text and images onto the page, without the need to set up a box for them first. It might frustrate power users, but for the majority of us it's an easier way of doing things.

Numerous extra features have been added to this new incarnation, not least of which is support for Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). This is available, logically enough, in the 'PDF' version of the software, not the 'Standard' edition. Exporting PDFs also lets you embed fonts into the file. The Artistic Text tool, while a bit of a muddle to use, allows you to apply some nice effects to your text; these include gradient fills and colour changes. These are accessed from another menu at the right of the screen, from where you can also examine the layout of your project, pull in clip-art and such like. A further welcome inclusion is a table production tool.

When it comes to sharing your work, PagePlus very nearly gets it right. Clearly the PDF feature is a real bonus, but so is the option to save your work as an image file (JPG, TIF or something similar). What the program won't do, though, is allow you to save work into a format supported by other DTP programs, and that for some may be a problem.

The bottom line, though, is that this is a powerful and effective piece of software that offers tremendous value for money.

PagePlus 8 continues the tradition of powerful, easy to use and inexpensive DTP software. It's excellent, only occasionally falling down due to being a little bit over-ambitious in places and lacking a common file format, which isn't likely to be a major problem for the target market.