I've used Family Tree Maker in the past and was reasonably happy with it. Pros - easy to use, customisable to a degreee, stores large amounts of data, latest version will export to PDF file for sharing. Cons - not cheap, very 'American'.
When I did some research with a view to replacing it, there wasn't much difference between the main names' offerings. I did find one package that would export to Excel which I thought would be helpful for research. There are quite a few these days and some of the software websites will allow demo downloads for evaluation.