No wonder Microsoft are withdrawing it! It makes the Office suites look like the over-complex and slow-w-w-w-w work solutions they are. Microsoft Works 9 gives you a simple database, an Excel-like spreadsheet, a word processor, calendar, email, address book, fast-access dictionary, Powerpoint viewer and more. Open Office put me off with its needless complexity and nerd-friendly list of options, Ashampoo Office costs more and doesn't always open docx very well (if at all, depending on version). docx (or xlsx) is the current Microsoft Office format, and people will send you documents saved in that format quite often - this product will let you open them, and send back similar documents if you want to. In short, for 95% of users, including myself, this is a superior product to Office because it is faster to start up, easier to use and does almost everything. For under £30? Just buy it, before it is withdrawn at the end of 2009. It will probably be all you need for the next few years - you can even do a 'mail merge' from the database and send out personalised emails, something which seems to be fraught with glitches in supposedly more capable (and certainly more expensive!) suites. Incredibly, it currently also qualifies you for a cheap upgrade to the full-blown Office 2007 products, which would save you £75 to £150 on buying them - should you absolutely need some obscure function that isn't in Works 9. The suite works well and can be learnt easily by a beginner, but many more demanding users will really appreciate the speed at which it lets you get things done. It even integrates with the full Office products very nicely, should you own them (I do). Incidentally, I'm not technically limited - I design web sites at code level. Many of the complaints on here seem to me to be rather ill-founded - there is, for example, absolutely no need to print out every record in a database. In short, this is an excellent and massively under-rated suite.