Right from the first moment you open Adobe GoLive!, it becomes obvious that this is not your standard Web page layout tool.

Web Easy promises that anyone can use it to create Web sites and even a complete novice can create and publish a page in less than an hour. With only a few qualifiers this is absolutely true.

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.

Simplicity is the single most important factor for any newcomer attempting to create their first Web site.

With advanced packages such as the latest Photoshop (to be reviewed next month) Adobe is the leading software developer when it comes to traditional graphic design...

Macromedia Contribute is a program for managing and updating Website content and has been designed for businesses without access to technical Website administration resources. Therefore it's perfect for non-technical computer users for managing their Website.

A miniature marvel, the E120N’s speed and size make it an obvious choice for home offices.

QuarkXPress defines and dominates high-end publishing in much the same way as Adobe Photoshop does photo editing.

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 bargain printer that’s well worth considering if you only need occasional colour.

A solid workgroup mono laser that delivers above-average quality and plenty of features for the price.

A workgroup laser with a good turn of speed and low running costs, but we expect better quality at this price.

Cheap to buy and run, the X5470 is great for mono printing, but less so for photos and images.

When Macromedia released the first Dreamweaver almost three years ago it was welcomed with open arms by professional Web developers.

An A3 colour printer with a good turn of speed, quality colour output and low running costs.

Capable of reproducing good photos, but it’s slow, a bit expensive to run and has a poor scanner.

A good quality and speedy colour laser printer, but the running costs are unsettlingly high.

Fast, cheap to run and offering flawless text quality, this is a great-value option.

It’s not quite an office grade product, but the MFC-7840W is a great choice for a busy home office.

A nice small footprint, which is an advantage in small office spaces, is the order of the day with HP’s offering to the mono marketplace. The LaserJet 1300 produced high quality text, with above average readability even on a grey background and at small point sizes. The embedded image on the test page was slightly over exposed, but still had good definition and solid well-formed black text, helping it to score highest overall in neutral text readability. Our monochrome test page turned up some minor blemishing and driver banding, but a reasonably smooth gradient helped the printer finish in first place overall here too.