With the capability of handling up to eight terabytes of data, and a boast that it's "the world's leading workgroup database software", you could immediately be forgiven for thinking that FileMaker 7 Pro is a piece of software best left for huge corporates. That's not so, however; thanks to a strong wizard feature, it's an application with much broader potential.

When you start it up for the first time, that wizard gives you the option of starting with one of numerous business and home templates. These cover everything from time cards, expense reports, purchase orders and event planning to inventories, home movie libraries and student records for schools. The developers have really hedged their bets here, wisely noting that their application is suited to a gamut of tasks. You don't have to use the templates, of course, but newcomers to the program are recommended to do so.

Taking the movie library as a simple example, the program offers default fields (albeit American ones, as you'll find with the film rating system) to enter the title, actors, director, format (DVD, VHS etc.), genre and notes, and then lets you add a voice note to the record along with the image. It took us no time at all to put a good few dozen records together, and one click of the mouse then had them ordered in an easy to read and sort format. It's also suitably simple to query the database by any of the fields within each record, and all of these templates can be customised with little fuss.

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Yet this is FileMaker at its simplest. More advanced options allow you to import an Excel spreadsheet into the program, just by a drag-and-drop. It works a lot better than we'd expected, too. Records can have files such as PDFs, photos and suchlike stored with them, and a multiple window feature allows the same data to be viewed in different ways simultaneously. Then there are substantial scripting options available, which do on the whole require a little more expertise.

Nonetheless, tasks such as e-mailing and report production can be automated once the initial handiwork has been done, and again, there are some useful built-in scripts that can help you on your way. Creating reports from your database is straightforward too, and is improved in this release, not least because a single file can now contain more than one table.

Getting more sophisticated still, the program will happily share data, and it facilitates this by supporting XML, along with XSL, JDBC and ODBC formats. It counters these features with added security functions, right down to requiring confirmation to change records. Like pretty much everything within the program, though, this is entirely customisable.

Where FileMaker 7 really scores though is its sheer scope. Not only can it handle as sophisticated a task as customer contact reports, it has the capacity to handle as much data as your hard drive can hold. It's to the credit of the developers that it can then zip about doing its work at speed, refusing to be slowed down much when dealing with great rafts of data.

An ambitious, easy to use database application that can be put to a vast array of uses. We've barely been able to touch on its features here, but suffice to say this is a comprehensive package that's flexible enough to use almost anywhere that a database is required.