This market-leading office suite can be purchased as a variety of software combinations. The Standard edition reviewed here comprises the latest versions of Word (word processor), Excel (spreadsheet), PowerPoint (presentation graphics) and Outlook (e-mail, contact manager and scheduler). There is no full database program in this edition.

Microsoft Office programs are not terribly speedy, but this could be down to the overstuffed - if wonderfully customisable - interface. Most annoying is the animated Office Assistant character who pops up everywhere to offer suggestions on tasks you're not remotely interested in, but at least you can switch it off. Word itself is a powerful, and surprisingly accessible, graphically rich word processor. It includes loads of excellent little features, such as being able to right-click on any word for a pop-up list of synonyms, not to mention HTML import and export.

Excel is a clean, multi-layered spreadsheet program with a vast formula and macro capability. Features like auto-complete and drag-and-drop moving of cell contents make editing easy, and you get an extensive range of charting and reporting options. PowerPoint is a good presentation package, but for graphics work there's a Draw utility built into all Microsoft Office programs for adding clip art, drawing simple vector artwork and even working with photo images in a basic way. The nice thing is you never have to leave your current document to use the Draw features, no matter which Office program you're running.

The core program around which Office 2000 revolves, though, is Outlook 2000. It's a combination e-mailer, contact manager and scheduler that can also be used for managing all your Office documents, Web favourites and so on centrally. Office 2000 also supports a feature called Web Folders which makes document sharing across a TCP/IP network a real snap, and you can e-mail directly from within any Office package. Microsoft Office is without doubt one of the most Internet-enabled suites around.