A whole lotta Office goin' on. Product/Link: Microsoft® Office 2000 Premium. Synopsis: Eight Office applications. Requirements: Windows 9x, NT4. Price: US$799. Rating: Don't bother. Comment: Microsoft® Office 2000 Premium -- no home PC should be without it (that's a joke, son). You get your Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, FrontPage, PhotoDraw, Small Business Tools. All in a compact 526MB that arrive on four, count them, four CDs. You're probably familiar with Word and Excel, the 2000 versions of which are even more Web-oriented. In fact, the whole package is belatedly designed for HTML use. Outlook, with its calendar, to-do lists, etc., is probably overkill for the home user. For simple email tasks, stick with Outlook Express. PowerPoint presentations should have been taken out back and shot years ago. We do use Access, a relational database, but the time it takes to learn and the complexities of linking to other programs are unrealistic and unnecessary for most. Publisher is cool for creating invitations, missing dog posters, ads for the local paper, group announcements, newsletters, award certificates, paper airplanes. And, yes, it will help you design a Web page. We don't use FrontPage for creating Web sites because (1) George doesn't much care for Bill Gates and (2) certain proprietary sever extensions must be available to handle pages created by FrontPage. PhotoDraw ain't half bad -- though it's no Paint Shop Pro. A nice feature is the ability to preview in real time the effects you choose. And it has lots of effects for doctoring photos. Small Business Tools coordinates Office programs to perform such tasks as creating direct mailings, tracking customer activity, producing financial reports. Wizards have come a long way in making Office applications easy to use. We'd wager 80% of anything you wanted to produce would have a template ready to go. In spite of that, Microsoft Office Premium comes with 254 pages of printed documentation. Unless you're running a business on computer, whatever Microsoft® Office version, with Bookshelf, is offered with many new computers is probably all you need. Then pick up a decent graphics program.