Reviewing Microsoft Works Suite 2005 is, for us, like visiting Harrods in the January sale. We can't afford 95% of their distinctly overpriced products for the rest of the year, but when they're benevolent enough to put an offer together, all of a sudden it seems like incredibly good value for money.

And make no mistake, Works Suite 2005 is incredibly good value for money. For just over £100 you get Autoroute 2005, Photo Premium 10, Word, Encarta Standard, Works 2005 and Money. That's some package, and half of the products within it could easily account for Works Suite's street price.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft bills the package as an ideal starting point for those with a new computer. The marketers might have a point, and the developers have tried, reasonably successfully, to make the whole thing hang together as a suite of apps too, via a straightforward menu.

That menu is application driven, meaning that instead of you choosing a particular program to run - which you can still do if you like - you can instead decide what you want to do. For instance, you can choose to make a flyer, do a bit of debt evaluation, make some photo labels or even synchronise data with a Windows CE or Palm device. The program also offers tasks that, instead of loading a program as such, send you off to a relevant Web site. It's undeniably slick stuff.

No qualms on the menu side, then, but what of the programs themselves? Word XP is, despite earning its fair share of knocks, a genuinely excellent and complete word processing application. Money is perhaps a little daunting for the novice user, and it still needs better integration with online financial services to become the genuinely useful application it threatens to be. As it stands, Money is good, but not without irritations.

Encarta Standard, meanwhile, is an excellent multimedia encyclopaedia, although for a tenner you could pick up the more rounded, if slightly out of date, older version of Britannica on the Focus Multimedia label. Or £70 gets you the premium suite version of Encarta, which adds an awful lot of extra content.

Autoroute 2005 is an excellent route planning application; not immeasurably removed from the 2004 edition, but there's little doubting it's a high quality piece of software. Photo Premium 10 is also strong, although no match for something like PhotoShop Essentials. And then there's Works 8, which chips in the likes of a spreadsheet, database and calendar, to good effect.

So there you have it. To be fair to Microsoft, the argument that this a good starting point for new users is a fair one, and you do get a good chunk of quality software for your £100 or so. The point remains, though, that if it didn't cost all that much in the first place...

This is the equivalent of a good quality music compilation; lots to like, a few bits that don't quite measure up, but a feeling that you've got good value at the end of it all.