CorelDraw 9 Office Edition is a versatile product based on the code of its high-end sibling, CorelDraw 9. Besides delivering many of the same powerful features, the Office Edition incorporates wizards and a simpler interface.
CorelDraw 9 Office takes a different approach to business graphics from that of Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000, which is easier to use. For instance, rather than being geared toward simple graphic creation, CorelDraw 9 Office is intended as a complete business graphics solution, offering image-editing, illustration, and desktop publishing capabilities. While it can create attractive newsletters, presentations, and Web pages, PhotoDraw 2000 depends on other Microsoft Office products for creating multipage documents and Web pages.
The CorelDraw 9 Office package includes such extras as Canto Cumulus Desktop le 4.0 (a media asset manager), Corel Presentations 9, hundreds of templates, and thousands of clip-art images and stock photos.
The program's powerful functions are readily available in the Office-style properties bar and dockable palettes. For example, the Object Properties docker lets you quickly change attributes such as fill, stroke, URL, and text wrap. But unlike Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000, it doesn't offer predefined styles or canned effects to help you easily format objects.
CorelDraw 9 Office's illustration tools are very robust. You can flow text along a path, edit Bezier curves, and apply a host of sophisticated effects. The program's effects allow more hands-on control than PhotoDraw 2000. All effects, including drop shadows, extrusions, and gradient transparencies, can be edited and infinitely tweaked.
For modifying imported bitmaps, Corel Draw 9 Office provides basic tools, like brightness and contrast controls. Alternatively, you can invoke an integrated bitmap editor that leverages Corel Photo Paint 9 technology to deliver a full range of photographic-editing tools, special effects filters, and compositing options.
CorelDraw 9 Office offers a high degree of integration with WordPerfect Office and Microsoft Office. We could not launch it as an OLE application from within Word 2000, but dragging drawings into Word worked perfectly.
Desktop publishing features include text-flow tools and paragraph level formats. But we were frustrated by certain limitations, such as the lack of page-based column guides and reusable text styles.
CorelDraw 9's Web publishing features are basic. Hot links can be assigned to objects in a drawing, but to do the same to a text string you must first convert Corel's proprietary text format to HTML-compatible text. Nor can CorelDraw 9 generate Web effects, such as the rollovers or sliced images that PhotoDraw 2000 handles so well.
CorelDraw, however, does include optimization options for compressing JPEG and GIF images. And useful output wizards do an admirable job generating HTML and PDF documents.
CorelDraw 9 Office doesn't provide the simple, canned effects that PhotoDraw 2000 offers. But business users who are comfortable working with graphics tools will appreciate CorelDraw 9 Office Edition's powerful image-creation tools and the artistic freedom that it offers.
US$230 street. Corel Corp. www.corel.com.
PC Magazine Rating: Very Good
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