I don't print many fancy documents, but there are times when churning out single-sided 8 ½ by 11 inch pages is woefully wasteful, such as, for example, when I download my favorite PDF-based electronic magazine and want to print all 80 pages of it to read in bed. Or when I need a copy of my electronic address book to take on a business trip. Printing simple brochures, greeting cards and invitations can also be a major headache without a desktop publishing program to lend a hand.

That is, unless you have ClickBook 2000. This clever printer utility effortlessly shrinks, twists, and flips any document (or group of files) into your choice of over 40 multi-page booklet designs. No fuss, no muss, and no desktop publishing tools required.

After popping in the CD-ROM and running ClickBook's setup program, I was prompted to set up my printer. ClickBook automatically recognized my Brother MFC 8600 and generated special drivers for use with the program. If the software does not recognize your printer for some reason, a custom Printer Setup Wizard walks you through generating sample printouts that define how your printer will handle ClickBook layouts.

To create my first ClickBook, I opened a 12-page Word document and clicked on the Print to ClickBook icon. ClickBook makes it easy to decide which layout to try by letting you to browse by category (books, favorites, brochures or cards). I selected 4-Up Portrait from the master list and clicked Print. ClickBook dutifully produced the front sides of my document first, all neatly shrunk to fit four pages per sheet. A helpful arrow and instructions on the top page indicated exactly how to place the paper back in the printer to do the other side. Simple -- twelve pages of information were compressed to fit on two pages.

For all it's ease of use, new users would get more out of ClickBook with better detailed documentation and a library of hints and tips for laying out content. When using complicated folded layouts or combining documents, I found myself tweaking, printing, and tweaking again to make the content fall where I wanted on each page. ClickBook does show a preview of your file but you can't expand the view to actual size to see fine detail before you print.

Despite these interface glitches, ClickBook is a surefire way to lower print costs and boost the productivity of any home or office printer.