If you often need to print documents in unusual formats, then ClickBook might be what you are looking for. But let's be clear from the start; it is not a design and print application. The design you need to do elsewhere, because ClickBook focuses on the print side of things.

You may find the initial setup process a little painful, but once that is done, the benefits are huge. If your printer is not already in the ClickBook database, and ours wasn't, you need to step through a procedure that has you printing sample sheets and telling the software what you see on them. It took about five minutes to get through this, but it's worth giving it your full attention, as a single error will result in your print projects not working.

The good news is that you only have to do this once (unless you change printers, of course). If you are feeling altruistic, you can then submit the settings for your printer to BlueSquirrel, so that they are added to the database of 'auto setup' printers. It might not help you, but it'll help someone else.

So how does it all work? Well, ClickBook installs a printer driver. You work on a document in the normal way, using whatever software you would normally use. Then when you are ready to print, chose to do so, but instead of selecting your printer, you opt for 'ClickBook Printer' instead. This starts the ClickBook software.

Now you can choose between broad types of document to print, such as books, brochures, cards and banners, and then opt for a particular layout within that broad grouping. While many of the layouts compress your original data, the banner formats expand it, so that you can produce, for example, a giant 'Happy Birthday' banner that spans a number of A4 sheets.

Either way, what you are doing by going through the process is breaking your original document into appropriate segments, with ClickBook sending the right instructions to the printer. Our test printer duplexes (prints on one side of the paper, then swallows it again and prints on the other side), so having made our selections within ClickBook and clicked the Print button, we just sat back and waited for it to spew out the printed product. If your printer doesn't duplex, and you want your final project printed on both sides of the paper, you'll need to do some re-feeding for double-sided printing.

Some layouts require a bit of cutting, but if you ask it to then ClickBook will print assembly instructions for you. It also provides some help relating to the different output formats, offering guidance on producing your original document for best printed results; suggesting, for example, minimum font sizes for booklets.

You can also configure borders, which are handy for printing posters or banners, as well as headers and footers which are probably most useful in formal documents. Not to mention page numbers and even watermarks.

If you need to do any kind of printing beyond the norm, ClickBook is worth every penny of its price. But you should anticipate spending a little time getting used to its ways, and we recommend you read the online manual thoroughly: it is not overly long, and it provides some useful information.