When presenting ideas today we must be more clear and effective. And when you present a report or spreadsheet numbers and words alone sometimes don't do enough. Active Office for Windows 95 by Software Publishing Corp. can help you create eye-catching visuals for Office 97 documents and other Windows applications that support OLE 2.0. Cost $50. I found it to be a very productive program.

Office 97 is the program suite that this software caters too. It also works with Excel and PowerPoint. It creates an icon in Microsoft Word (When you are using another program the icon appears in the Windows 95 Taskbar) when installed. Installation is relatively easy and straightforward. When you click the icon a floating window with all the options to enhance your document. The presentation styles in the window include Groups, Charts, Tables, Scheduling and Others. You can enhance your document by navigating this window. You can drag and drop stamps. You can turn tables and outlines into puzzle graphs. Highlight your key ideas, trends, or relationships and select a layout. You can change the color scheme, the background design, and the textures. You can make your document unique and stand out.

Making your document unique with styles and objects may require a bit of trial and error experimentation. It is a good idea to save your work to a second working file, keeping the original untouched. I experienced the trial and error method of learning the program. My manual seemed to be missing from the box so I went to the tutorial on the CD to get a feel for the dynamics of the program. While Active Office does a great job of converting text to OLE objects, undoing your work requires using the undo command inyour Office application. In some cases I had to retype some of my work.

In conclusion, Active Office can create Stamps and Layouts within minutes. When trying to get your point across it can definitely help. The draw back is that if you change your mind and don't want the graphic, you may have to do some retyping. You will want to experiment with the copy you made of your original document. If you can visualize what you want this will help you save some steps. It's great when you get the finished product done.