We've all been there. It's late evening and you're out at a twenty-four hour supermarket, having just remembered that your mum's birthday is tomorrow. Scanning the racks of cards, there are sickly sweet ones with teddy bears hugging each other. Urgh. A jokey card with a picture of a hippo swilling a glass of champagne on the front. Yeah, maybe not. One with a picture of a birthday cake and some candles, which would be great, if she was three.

Who designs the bloody things these days, anyway? And why haven't they all been fired? Well, the obvious solution to this nightmare scenario is to nip back home and design your own, except crayoning a bunch of flowers onto the reverse side of a cereal packet might not cut it. Printing one off using Focus's Greeting Cards package might just. In theory.

The program offers a range of template cards, which can be edited to your own taste, or you can design one from scratch. 10,000 clipart images are included on the disc, and these (along with the template cards) are divided into a good selection of diverse themes, from the usual birthday, wedding, Christmas and sympathy cards, through to graduation congratulations and even a happy Hanukkah.

Sadly, the clipart quality isn't very impressive. There are lots of bland images here, with many which look quite similar, so the variety stakes don't hold up well either. Don't get us wrong, it's not disastrously bad, but there's nothing here that would get Rolf Harris jiggling his wobble-board in excitement (which is one small mercy).

When it comes to making your own card, you can use the clipart (resizing and rotating it as appropriate), and there's a text tool to add pithy words of wisdom. This has a number of decent built-in effects, such as curved or wavy text, but it's actually fairly clunky to use as you can't simply stretch a text box to make the letters bigger, rather you have to fiddle about with font sizes inside a menu. There's also a freehand drawing tool for the more artistically talented, and further design options are available in the program's Internet palette.

This is a separate window on the right of the card design area, which is essentially an integrated Internet Explorer. The clever bit is that you can surf the Web for free clipart images inside it, and drag and drop them directly into your cards, so you don't have to rely solely on the bundled clipart.

This is a neat little idea, but the downside is that you can't use links that open a new browser window, as these just open an IE window outside of the program (which images can't be dragged from). Also, the built-in window is necessarily small - as you want most of the space for designing your card - so you can't see much of the Web sites and have to view them using scrollbars.

This is a reasonable effort, and you can design a passable greeting card using the program. However, it's let down by the functionality of several of the tools, and the generally poor quality of the bundled clipart.