If your desktop-publishing endeavors tend more toward printing greeting cards, banners, and party invitation than printing magazines and annual reports, programs such as PageMaker and Microsoft Publisher are likely overkill for your needs. Still, while Sierra's Print Artist is aimed clearly at the home user (and particularly at families), it can also crank out colorful real estate brochures, restaurant menus, and departmental newsletters.

Even if you have no eye for design, you can create classy, colorful productions using Print Artist. The program includes a staggering number of predesigned templates to get you started--more than 10,000 in all. You'll find greeting cards, calendars, invitations, banners, thank-you notes, CD labels, brochures, and much, much more. At a loss for words? More than 5,000 "sentiments" are available. And with more than 150,000 pieces of clip art and photos, you can find an appropriate graphic for just about any occasion. Finally, 300 fonts let you customize the look of your text to appeal to anyone from your kids to your boss.

Of course, all of this information takes up a lot of space. The program comes on six CD-ROMs. While the box says 400MB of hard disk space is required, the program is at its best when you can install all of the CDs on your hard disk, which fills about 3.5GB of space. Otherwise, you'll be in for a fair amount of disk swapping as you create your masterpiece.

If you want to integrate your digital camera images with your creation, you'll appreciate the included Sierra Photo Lab software, which lets you perform simple operations such as Crop, Resize, red-eye reduction, and sharpening.

On the downside, Print Artist Deluxe Edition includes no documentation at all--the largish box contains just a single reference card and a smaller box holding the program CDs. Luckily, the interface is extremely intuitive, so even novice computer users shouldn't have problems using the program.

More severe is a problem with some greeting card pages not printing. Sierra is working on a patch to fix this, and currently has a workaround posted to its Print Artist support message board.

Given the program's amazing value for its price, however, a few glitches wouldn't prevent us from recommending Print Artist. With graphics for virtually every occasion and an interface friendly enough for everyone from the kids to Grandpa, it's an excellent solution for home printing needs.

Pros: Very easy to use, huge collection of graphics and pre-designed projects
Cons: No manual, occasional printing problems