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This has to be one of the very best value for money packages that I have ever seen. The idea behind this collection was that they should be very simple business programs that could be used, by small businessmen and women, to discover if the full versions could be of use in their work. What happened was that the programmers assigned to the project got so involved that they ended up producing very respectable working versions of the programs instead.

So for your £6 you actually get three business programs, a word processor, a database and a spreadsheet with graphics. The word processor is the weakest of the three, I feel. There is the option of 20 to 40 characters per line, which means that output on an 80 column printer is not as you see on screen. A novel idea is that the 20 column output can be printed, on the Epson Bit Image range, as screen dumps and therefore emerge exactly as you see it on screen. Another innovation is the 'words per minute' count that you are given as you type text into the machine. There are other options which mean that this can actually be used as a simple text editor besides just a demonstration.

The database program is much better and although it has a low limit on the amount of data per record, it is likely to be of use to anyone who wants to computerise a small card file system. The program can search the database using either the full and exact string or parts of the strings or in the case of numeric fields, using equality, less than, more than or numbers between two specified values. This really is a vast range of options and with the multi-field sorting routine it is a better program than at least one I have used priced at £20.

The final set of programs comprise the spreadsheet package and, once again, these have features to shame many full priced 'business' programs. There is a continual update option so that any change in values is put into immediate effect. The formulae can contain most of Basic's arithmetical operators and are very simple to proogram. Labels are also easy to set up and there are special keys which will insert a line at any point. After you have prepared the sheet you can then save and load up the graphics program. This allows you to prepare graphs of any of the rows that you have saved. There are a number of options and there is a printer dump, for Epson-compatible printers.

As you can tell, this is an impressive suite of programs and not only because of the price. I cannot believe that anyone will be disappointed in this package and there must be a number of users of other programs who wish that it had been released before they made some expensive mistakes. The only thing that I would like is a set of function keystrips - but you can always make your own!

Mike Kent