You don't often come across a real time clock, a calculator and graph-producing package integrated together for the Amstrad, well not every day at least. Use It is just this and offers fully controllable features for all three of its parts. Taking a full eight minutes to load, the program features some very nice icon-like graphics. Icon-like in that they look rather the same but unfortunately are not used for inputting information but just to enhance the screen display.

The clock offers a choice of digital or analogue faces, stopwatch, countdown, and alarm facilities but, unfortunately, the real time element does not stretch to a constant real-time display making this program of little practical use.

The calculator is pretty but not that functional. Even with binary and hexadecimal calculation facilities, the lack of convenience is regrettable.

The graph package is better than the other two and more useful. Up to 20 different values (I would have liked 24 as a minimum for biannual figures) can be displayed as pie charts, line graphs or bar charts, and there are comprehensive editing features. As with most graph packages though, without the ability to dump the contents to a printer the package loses most of its value.

If the package could have been run concurrently while another program (say a word processor) was in operation - rather like the IBM program, Sidekick - then it would be of great value and I would have recommended it. As it does not, I see little use for it and can only think of it as a novelty overpriced at £6.95.

C.G.