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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Like the Pioneer, the Protac Excel D495 is another locally built giant – at this size we’re wading into desktop replacement territory.

The Web Excel PT-3830 is an 802.11b wireless access point, four-port switch and DSL router all-in-one. It's a good package if you want to share your DSL modem with a small network, but everything about the PT-3830 is definitely no-frills. Closer examination, however, reveals a highly configurable device.

Another PCI device to come supplied with a detachable antenna, it can be adjusted into one of three locking positions: parallel to the backplane, 45 degrees away from the card, or perpendicular to the backplane.

Reasonably priced for a $99 dual-band wireless 802.11b/g PCMCIA, it's physically identical in size to the Level OneWPC-0300 device.

Improvements all round keep PowerPoint well ahead of the competition.

If you're after an ultra portable, this isn't the notebook for you. If you're after a large form factored portable desktop replacement, this could be the ticket. This behemoth of a notebook features a 17-inch widescreen display and a footprint to match.

We're doing our best to champion Australia's home grown White Box market.

Built around the same notebook housing as the Emagen Zephyra XT, this attractive high shine lid is one of the better looking notebook covers we've seen, making this product appear out of its price range.

It might seem unfair comparing MYOB’s best selling single user product with Quicken’s multi-user small business accounting package, but the key difference between the two is number of licences and not the functionality.

Optical character recognition (OCR) software has been around for a long time and OmniPage from ScanSoft is often touted as the market leader in this space.

A stunning piece of design matched with excellent battery life, but with an Atom inside the price is surely too high