An intriguing little product this, and one that's not without some advantages. Press Release bills itself as a piece of software to help you put together a press announcement, and then it connects up to a database to help you send it out. That simplifies matters a little, though, so let's go back to the start.

The program invites you to follow a wizard at first to help you put your release together, so that's where we started. Sadly, it was here that we hit our first problem. The opening screen of the wizard invites you to fill in some basic information, but it's in American format. Thus, there's a field for a zip code but not for a postcode. That's really not good enough. Once you've filled in the form, you're asked to tick a box if you want to save this as the default information for the rest of your press releases.

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Next up, you need to decide whether your release is going to be sent by post or e-mail, or through submission to free online press distribution websites. We picked the latter. Then, sensibly, you're questioned as to whether to choose plain text or HTML for your release: a thoughtful step. Similar steps are provided for the other options, too.

Then it's template time. The program includes a variety to pick from, although you can also go with a blank sheet of 'paper' and use the formatting tools to get things how you want them. We started with the template and, while the choices are hardly radical, they are logical.

From there, though, it's in your hands, and disappointingly, there are no pointers here on writing a good release (though that might just be us: try as we might, we couldn't find the PR guide promised on the box). Given the daily contents of our inbox, that's the kind of help that would surely be appreciated by many.

It's simple enough to edit the template and we had a decent-looking release ready and waiting in fairly short time, but then we've seen thousands of such releases in our lifetime and it would undoubtedly be more difficult for a non-media company to put together a decent press release without guidance.

Distribution was more troubling. We opted for the web submission, but it wasn't clear how we did this and where we had to get a username and password from. After a bit of clicking, we did find out, but the program then informed is that we needed to go to the individual sites and register with them first: a bit of a pain.

More worryingly, we then saw that the media database was again restricted to North America, making it of limited use to a UK buyer. It also makes moot the promise of regular updates.

Which is all a bit frustrating. It's as if Press Release gets you part of the way, but has suffered from being a lazy UK import, replete with a product cover that looks like it's just come out of an inkjet printer. That in itself wouldn't be a problem, but the software itself simply has little use in the UK market. It's helpful for its templates and it's a generally friendly application. But it doesn't finish the job.

Solid software, professionally put together for the most part. It's not much use unless a localised version comes along, though.