For 20 years Serif has been selling Pageplus as a budget desktop publishing program with features to rival those of high-end professional programs costing many times more.

The latest version, Serif Pageplus X2, builds on past strengths and adds exciting new features such as PDF slideshows containing video and audio clips, and full compatibility with Windows Vista.

Not only can Vista's Search feature locate Pageplus documents by examining their contents, it can also display them as resizable thumbnail images in Vista Explorer.

Trying to be all things to all users is not a trick that's easy to manage, but Pageplus X2 almost pulls it off. New publications can be created from scratch by starting with a blank page and setting up your own framework for text and pictures, but as a rule it's easier to use one of the hundreds of ready-made templates. These cover projects such as web pages, flyers, posters, greetings cards, stationery and virtually every kind of business document.

If the ready-made publications don't exactly meet your needs they can be customised using the full range of desktop publishing features embedded within Pageplus X2, and it's at this point that the printed manual and on-screen tutorials come into their own.

Unfortunately the on-screen tutorials are nothing more than static documents that can be printed out for future reference, and we can't help feeling that beginners would get up to speed more easily with interactive demonstrations and wizards.

Unlike professional desktop publishing programs, which are mainly used to collate work created in other programs, Pageplus is completely self-contained. It contains an advanced text editor with spelling and grammar checking and a UK thesaurus. There's an image editor, built-in drawing and diagramming tools, and even the facility to generate interesting 3D graphics from your own 2D artwork or photographs.

The cleverest feature of Pageplus X2 is its ability to work with Pdf files. As well as creating Pdf slide shows and presentations of its own, it is able to load standard Pdf files for editing, and these can be saved as new Pdf files, web pages or Pageplus publications.

For this facility alone, Pageplus is an absolute bargain.

Vista compatible: Yes