Stories by: Molly Furzer

MYOB's new JustInvoices is just right for people who run their own business and don't feel the need for a full-blown accounting package with a full-blown price. As its name suggests, this capable and simple $79.95 program is an invoicing solution aimed at small business, allowing you to track quotes, sales, GST and payments. In many cases, this is all a small business - such as a contractor, labourer or freelancer - will need. The main advantage with a program like this as opposed to using a word processor and spreadsheet for invoicing is its reporting capabilities. Detailed reports can be created on a variety of parameters, such as outstanding quotes, invoices you've made, sales and GST collected; very handy at BAS time.

Have you heard the news on the street? Alter-natives to Microsoft Office are greatly improving with every version release and cost just a fraction of the price commanded by the market dominator. StarOffice and Ability Office have been around for a while now, but a new contender has entered the market: the China-based and US-investor-backed Evermore Software.

When my hard drive died last year and my Office 2000 CDs were inexplicably missing, I turned to OpenOffice — a free download — and it’s served me well. Twelve months later and with fewer crashes, hangs and errors, I am now an alternative office convert and looking for something a little more sophisticated.

Home productivity suites from Microsoft and Corel have long been favourites with consumers keen on having all the necessary tools at less cost than full-blown office suites. The value in this year’s releases of Microsoft Works Suite 2004 and Corel’s WordPerfect Family Pack 5 will not disappoint.

For a long time, PhotoImpact has been positioned in the mid-tier image editing market. Competing products include Adobe’s PhotoShop Elements and Jasc Software’s Paint Shop Pro, from which Ulead’s PhotoImpact differs in its packaged bundle and the ever-improving core module.

Symantec’s Norton AntiVirus has long been at the top of the list of antivirus options. The latest version turns its attention to non-virus threats such as spying, hacking and unauthorised remote access.

It doesn’t seem very long ago that we first looked at Macromedia Contribute, the $226 desktop Web maintenance tool designed to make Web content updates easy for everyone.

As any Internet user will have noticed, the use of Adobe’s Port­able Document Format (PDF) has proliferated. And it’s little surprise why: PDFs offer a safe and reliable way to share documents on multiple platforms.

The final public beta of Microsoft’s Office 2003 sits the suite firmly in the enterprise league as a complete front end system.

The simple fact that Office 2003 will run on Windows 2000 and XP only may be just the impetus for some users to look elsewhere for their next productivity suite.