PagePlus X5 (www.serif.com, $99.99) is the latest version of a desktop publishing program sporting a wealth of new and enhanced features to let you create professional-looking printed projects of any type. The program is easy enough for making greeting cards, calendars and posters, but includes plenty of advanced features for creating complex catalogs, complete books, sales flyers or web pages--and much more.

PagePlus X5 includes nearly 1,000 templates (listed by category), and it’s easy to change or revise any template item to suit your needs. Or, use the many features to create your own materials from scratch.

Notable among the new features is the improved ability to edit almost any PDF file. The improved Image Cutout Studio lets you remove parts of images and keep just the parts you want, and the LogoStudio includes a wide range of professional quality logo templates and images for creating a distinctive logo.

We started by making a greeting card from a template. By changing the text, color and font from what was in the template, we had a personalized, colorful card in minutes. We also created a newsletter and found it easy to substitute the background images we wanted, insert headlines and text and add photos.

If you don’t want to use templates, a vast range of options lets you do projects from scratch. Text can be angled, written on any type of curve (very cool), and used in any place or shape on the page; graphics and photos can be sized, shaped and/or altered, and they can even be placed inside one of the many included shapes (heart, octagon, circle, among others).

For multi-page projects, Master Pages lets you save elements (such as a logo, background or border design) and have all those elements automatically included on each page. This feature is especially useful in projects such as newsletters, booklets or catalogs.

The included BookPlus lets you synchronize elements between chapters, renumber pages, and put it all together in a book that can also include a table of contents and index. You can also use PagePlus X5 to create Web pages, publish them to a Web site, make revisions and changes and then publish the changes to the Web site again.

The program includes tool tips, onscreen help and numerous video tutorials; or you can buy a 300-page printed User Guide or Resource Guide. Although there are plenty of simple projects in PagePlus X5, many advanced features will take time to learn and master if you want to take full advantage of them–-but time spent on learning will pay big dividends.