The hottest item in all the catalogs this summer has been the “do-anything” tool the handy pocket-sized gadget that turns into pliers, saw, screwdriver, scissors, ruler or bottle opener.

With summer coming to an end and the school year starting anew, we’re going to focus this week on the personal computer version of the do-anything tool, useful in dozens of ways for students (and ex-students) of all ages.

The tool is the ever-popular program called The Print Shop, from Broderbund. This is one of the best-selling software titles ever, for home, office and school use. If you don’t have it, you need it. But even those who do have a copy somewhere on the hard disk generally don’t take full advantage of its power.

The Print Shop first appeared in 1984 as a program that would print long banners on a continuous roll of paper (“Welcome Home Aunt Myrtle!”) and make cutesy personalized greeting cards. Charming, but hardly essential.

Since then, Broderbund has poured so much ingenuity into this program that it now does vastly more than that. And the new features still spin off a single illustrated menu, which means you don’t need a graduate degree in computer science to make full use of the program.

With very little practice, you can turn out handsome sales brochures, newsletters, posters, report covers, photo collections, letterhead (with matching envelopes), business cards, calendars, labels, invitations, and even sticky notes with your name or business logo on top.

The program creates fancy certificates that look completely official. Our teenagers even figured out how to use it to make a perfect replica of their school’s official seal (which makes us just a tad suspicious whenever a new report card or “Principal’s Award” comes home).

The resident high-schooler found herself assigned last June to help with the school’s annual sports award banquet. Using The Print Shop, she first turned out formal invitations and then printed up posters with color photos of the school’s leading jocks to advertise the event. Then she made menus, programs, award certificates (complete with that disturbingly authentic school seal) and colorful pennants to mark the table where each team was to sit. She never went near a real print shop or copy store.

The work was all done in a few hours with The Print Shop and the Epson Stylus 800 color printer, a noisy machine that turns out beautiful color copy. We didn’t even have to buy paper, because she printed almost everything on the back of old press releases that had come in the mail.

Once a single program, The Print Shop has been so successful that the marketing execs at Broderbund have turned it into a category. There are now a half-dozen versions of the product, ranging from a $25 standard edition (that is, plain vanilla) to The Print Shop Publishing Suite, which combines an easy-to-use desktop publishing program with all the other Print Shop features. Since the Suite version the most powerful only costs about $50, you might as well go for that one.

People who love high-quality greeting cards might be interested in a variant called The Print Shop Signature Greetings (about $25), which offers card designs from the artist Marcel Schurman and the Papyrus retail outlets. Frankly, we were underwhelmed by this product; there are 5,000 potential card designs, but they seemed rather ordinary.

We have some complaints with The Print Shop. The first is Broderbund’s failure to produce a Macintosh version. (Mac users have a variety of graphics programs to choose from, but they aren’t as simple.)

Next, there is so much stuff packed into the new versions of the program (180 fonts, 23,000 pictures and photos, 2,000 greeting card quotes) that it can take a long time to preview them all. The latest versions of the program deal with this problem by including printouts of all the available graphics but these collections run to 700 pages!

On another note, we messed up in a recent column about Metasearch engines on the Internet. We referred to WebCrawler as a Metasearch site. In fact, the name is MetaCrawler, and it is found at www.metacrawler.com.

T.R. Reid is Rocky Mountain bureau chief of the Washington Post. Brit Hume is managing editor of Fox News in Washington. You can reach them in care of the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St., Washington D.C. 20071-9200, or you can e-mail T.R. Reid at [email protected], or Brit Hume at [email protected].