In today’s increasingly competitive environment the development of high performance advanced materials is very important. Many material manufacturers no longer specialize in a single product area but have diversified. As a result research and development laboratories often work on a range of materials that can have significantly different physical and chemical properties. For this reason analytical instrumentation must be extremely flexible in that it must be able to accommodate samples existing in a variety of physical states without compromising sensitivity and reproducibility. Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) is no exception and this review will discuss the use of DMA for the viscoelastic characterization of a wide range of samples including liquids, polyester film, latex rubber, prepreg and composites.