Stories by: Dennis O'Reilly

Anyone who has followed Microsoft Office through its succession of lacklustre upgrades in recent years would be excused for yawning at the prospect of the 2007 version. Well, wake up: The 2007 Office System is easily the most compelling Office upgrade seen in recent years, even if the 2007 applications do impose a more-demanding learning curve than their predecessors did.

Despite SeaMonkey's rough edges, its bundling of a browser, an e-mail utility, and an HTML editor in one package is appealing.

Lately it seems as if everybody and their second cousin have attempted to follow Google's example by cobbling together a browser toolbar. Most of these shortcut collections do little more than push the page content farther below the virtual fold and replace it with a string of ads to the company's sites and services (the Yahoo Toolbar is a prime example of this approach). But it's clear to us, based on using the beta of Google Toolbar 4, that the first is still the best.

We checked out a shipping version of Microsoft's home-user-centric Works Suite 2006. For $169.95 it includes the same four apps as the existing $100 Works 8 bundle (a plain-jane word processor, Excel-compatible spreadsheet, a basic database, and a calendar program), plus a few additional applications I found particularly useful.

If you need an easier way to share and comment on documents, take a look at Adobe's Acrobat 7 Professional. The $839 program lets you create Portable Document Format (PDF) files that users of Adobe's free Reader 7 can annotate - but only if you let them.

Like something out of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory, the programmers at Netscape have resurrected a browser that most Internet users had left for dead. At the same time, they have created a two-headed monster of a browser in the new Netscape 8, which lets you choose to view pages as you would either in the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox version 1.0.3 or in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6.

It's not often that a single new tool can genuinely transform how you use an application - especially a program as venerable as Adobe's Illustrator (a vector-drawing mainstay since 1987). But if your digital art projects ever begin with a scanned traditional drawing, Illustrator CS2's Live Trace feature really does change everything. Live Trace and a related feature called Live Paint are the most interesting new tricks in an upgrade that adds lots of worthwhile stuff, though it also leaves a few things undone.

Why sink hundreds of dollars into an office software suite with scores of features you'll never use?