Money Standard 2004 walks you through checkbook-balancing and budget- or expense-tracking jobs that will help you put your personal finances in order. It's very handy for home-oriented tasks such as bill payments online and downloading financial statements. However, if you're looking for in-depth assistance with investments, credit and tax management, and setting up future financial-goals, application is short on those departments. It lacks tax-planning tools that are otherwise available in Deluxe and Premium versions.

When it comes to photo editing, Suite's Picture It Photo Premium 9.0 provides more features from its predecessor. Aside from basic red-eye removal and rotation and cropping tools, it has a new image acquisition wizard that lets you transfer photos easily from its sources like digital camera, scanner, and hard drive, among others. It also comes with over 1,500 templates for photo cards, frames, calendars, and several image-oriented home projects.

But what really made my day was support system provided by Microsoft for users of this application. Aside from an easy interface, technical support is available anytime to provide users with answers to queries and problems. I even have my friend raving about an experience she had with a customer representative. The customer representative was courteous enough to return her call when she was unable to complete it previous day. Add to that, she got her answers accurately and politely.

In addition, Works Suite 2004 comes with a one-year guarantee of FREE phone support, as well as an online support system available during first year at no charge to user.

•For additional depth and color to vector images, use gradients; but don't overuse so as to avoid adding to file size and speeds.

•Don't overdo your media. Your audience will definitely get indigestion from your web site.

•Never make your audience wait. Downloading an image that takes millions of years to finish will definitely make your audience cranky. They'd probably clicked to another site even before your banner finished downloading itself. "If people have to wait, be sure it's really worth their while," says HotWired's resident interface designer.

•Design delays that cover loading process. Flash features full attributes that helps in keeping audience occupied while that giant sound file is loading in background. Flash's Bandwidth Profiler is said to provide a big help on this.

•Use knowledge and wisdom of your friends and colleagues. A good multimedia comes from a diverse source of skills found in people. The adage that two minds are better than one definitely applies here. Talk to other multimedia designers or join groups and mailing lists to share ideas and knowledge. What you think is trash for you might be a goldmine for another artist.