No computer is properly complete without its own Office package. Office assists in the compilation of texts of all kinds, in the completion of spreadsheet calculations and in the preparation of expressive presentations. In these tasks, Microsoft Office is the generally accepted standard, as its formats are established and the functions it offers are continually required. However: many users are unable to afford the Office suite.Ashampoo Office 2008 only occupies a limited amount of storage space on the hard drive, is very stable and still offers all of those Office functions which genuinely need to be used in private or in business environments. It goes without saying that the most important thing is the fact that reading and writing in the original Word, Excel and PowerPoint files without losses of content or in terms of formatting presents no problem for the Ashampoo Office 2008. That means that every user of the Ashampoo Office is able to open, modify and then save a Word file in exactly the same way as if the work had been done in Word itself.Ashampoo Office 2008 is supplied with the word processing programme Ashampoo TextMarker, the spreadsheet programme Ashampoo PlanMaker and the presentations software Ashampoo Presentations.As a word processing programme, TextMaker is able to cope with texts. The programme is able to lay out a table of contents, an index and tables, can import graphics and is also able to place 3D texts. With PlanMaker, number games of all kind no longer present any problems. The spreadsheets offer countless formulae which are a great help with automatic calculations. Its implementation of highlighted columns of figures in expressive 2D and 3D diagrams is particularly effective.Presentations is a new product. The presentations programme brings images and texts together, and using the pre-sets, can easily generate a visual presentation which can then be played back on the PC monitor.