Greenstreet Publisher 4.6

Greenstreet’s Publisher isn’t the most sophisticated desktop-publishing program available for home users or small businesses, but it’s affordable and easy to use, and well worth considering for simpler publishing projects.

The program provides a wide range of tools for designing and printing several different kinds of document. When Publisher is started its Startup screen provides three main options.

More experienced users can just create a blank page and work on the page layout from scratch, but there’s a selection of built-in tutorials that will guide beginners through the basics of document design, along with a collection of templates to help get started.

The templates cover a variety of documents from business cards to newsletters, posters, and folding leaflets. Users can alter the appearance of any template very easily by choosing one of the many pre-defined colour schemes or font settings.

However, it’s a little disappointing that most of the templates for documents such as newsletters will only create just one or two pages. You can use the Add Page function to create longer, multi-page documents, but the user is still left to do much of the layout work themselves. This means that Publisher is really best suited to shorter documents.

But within that limitation Publisher provides plenty of design tools for users to work with. As well as basic tools for creating a page layout containing multi-column text and graphics, it includes a wide range of useful extras.

There’s a simple spreadsheet that allows users to insert tables of numerical data and graphs and charts, a ‘powertext’ tool for creating eye-catching 3D text and logos, and a mail-merge option that can be used for printing out mailshots and group letters. There’s even an option for printing barcode labels containing product information.

Our only other complaint is that there’s no printed manual included with the program, and wading through the on-screen help files to find information about specific features was a bit frustrating at times.

However, at just over £30, Greenstreet Publisher is still good value if you need a little help designing simple documents for a small business or a club.