What type of broad label would you use to describe MSpowerpoint and Dreamweaver?

business application software

They really don’t go together… Powerpoint is for offline presentations and Dreamweaver is for website building. That said, the attribute they share is that they both help share information, so I would go for a label like “information dispersal”.

Pagemaker isn’t really graphics software in league with Illustrator (vector-based) and Photoshop (rasterized)... it’s desktop publishing and page layout software. You could do some similar work in either Microsoft Word or PowerPoint (although they are primarily focused in other areas).

With Word and PowerPoint, you can export your document as a web page… but again, that’s not their primary goal. Adobe (nee Macromedia) Dreamweaver, on the other hand, is specifically web site building/management software. It cannot export its results into say, a Word doc format. That makes its use much more targeted.

Ultimately, I would more likely lean to putting PageMaker and Dreamweaver into some arbitrary category (one for documents and the other for the web) simply as page layout tools. You might add Word to that list if you choose. And Adobe Framemaker while you’re at it.

Believe it or not, using your groupings, I’d consider lumping PowerPoint in graphics software with Photoshop and Illustrator. It can be used to create custom graphics (charts, slides, clip art) to represent any number of things. I’ve seen it used frequently to build flow charts, architectural diagrams, org charts, etc… especially if people don’t want to pay for Microsoft Visio (which could also be added to the same group).

So…

GRAPHICS SOFTWARE
– Adobe Illustrator
– Adobe Photoshop
– Microsoft PowerPoint
– Microsft Visio

DESKTOP PUBLISHING and PAGE LAYOUT
– Adobe PageMaker
– Adobe FrameMaker
– Adobe Dreamweaver
– Microsoft Word