Microsoft’s radical redesign promises ‘better results, faster’. Be fully prepared for this world-leading productivity software.

It's an accepted fact that most Microsoft Office users only ever use about 20 percent of the suite's capabilities, often because they don't have the time to learn about all of the goodies it contains. Excel, with its complicated interface and feature overload is notorious for baffling even experienced users. However, many of its features are very useful in their own right.

David Moss tackles Vista queries, as well as dealing with floating bars and annoying pop-up reminders.

We evaluate the various versions of Office 2007 and what they offer, and find a companion to help with search

Our pick of the low-cost office suites has had a much-needed overhaul, and now battles Microsoft in terms of features, not just price.

The buzzword in Excel 2003 is XML, best illustrated by the new mapping feature. This lets you map cells, columns and ranges to data held in XML data sources, so you can create Excel workbooks showing data from Web Services or other back-end data stores. The XML data is validated on input into Excel against a custom XML Schema under your control. Excel can also save your work in a native XML workbook format, which keeps any formatting but avoids the proprietary XLS file format. You may also, however, save data as a pure XML data file, leaving any formatting in the template. This XML data file can be put through BizTalk or imported into a back-end database.

A rewritten front end makes Excel’s significant power far more accessible than before.

Useful new features and a total interface overhaul make this the best Office ever.

Many users unable to open documents.

Spreadsheet software displays incorrect numbers.

Dual-core and Windows Vista make it into our A-List’s Value PC category.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

Useful new features and a total interface overhaul make this the best Office ever.

Quad core at this price is fantastic, but it’s not as fast as it should be.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

The Excel G736 notebook from Protac is a desktop replacement, and as well as better-than-normal notebook specifications it also comes with the other traditional trapping of a desktop replacement notebook: it's big, it's chunky, and it's heavy.

The technical demos of browser-based Office apps are available to select testers only.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

Not pretty, but a technically competent and comprehensive upgrade to the best free office suite around.

It has been over two years since we previewed Office XP, but Microsoft has finally given us a glimpse of Office 2003. The finished version should be on the shelves by the end of July, but will it be worth the upgrade? The answer could be an emphatic 'yes' if you're a Tablet PC user, as Microsoft has just launched OneNote (see page 59), making full use of electronic ink. The company is also introducing InfoPath (see page 59) for designing electronic forms, with the flexibility of XML. The classic apps have also had their seen refurbishment, with Outlook (page 56) getting the most attention, and FrontPage and Publisher (page 58) a bit of a revamp.