Microsoft Office Publisher 2007 review

When you start Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, you're offered a choice of templates for almost any kind of publication.

Some are themed by style, so you can mix and match, and they even have colour schemes, so you can change the look with a single click. This is a great idea, and there are plenty of templates supplied, with more available to download. The trouble is they're all terrible.

We're not saying some of them aren't very good; we're saying every single one is very bad. Typography, graphics and layout are all below the lowest imaginable quality threshold. Aesthetics aside, the templates make no use of master pages and many don't even have column guides defined, which makes it difficult even to start customising them.

If you want decent results you're on your own, and that's not much fun, either. All the basic layout functions are catered for. You can edit facing pages together, create and apply master pages, place and crop pictures, wrap text around them and flow it between columns. However, the interface doesn't feel as if it was created by or for anyone who lays out pages regularly. Replace a picture with another, for example, and instead of appearing in the same frame the new one arrives at its own size and shape. Typographic controls are too limited, and effects such as customisable shadows and glows are absent.

Some 'professional' features have been added, but they often miss the point. The Design Checker offers a form of pre-flighting (spotting wrongly formatted pictures or overflowed text) but messes up the way you select which errors to look for, so it's all but useless. The Commercial Printing Tool can convert a document to spot colour, automatically duo-toning any photos to use the selected inks, which would be useful if you had any say in the process. It can also convert to CMYK, but this removes any transparency effects. The PDF add-in gives you a few choices, including allegedly press-ready output, but the default settings lead you astray (for example, disabling bleed) and there's too little control overall. The option to create your own trapping settings, something high-end users would rarely tackle, is laughable in a product of this calibre.

The price might be reasonable for a budget offering - if the product were a lot better, and PagePlus wasn't available for less than half the price. As well as being sold as a standalone product, Office Publisher comes with the Small Business, Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Microsoft Office 2007. It ought to be in the Home and Student Edition, as kids are often asked to produce posters and newsletters as part of the National Curriculum and tend to do it in PowerPoint, which is hopelessly ill-suited. However, even the Academic Edition of Publisher costs around £85 including VAT. At these prices, we can't recommend it.