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Perhaps you need to embellish an important presentation with some attractive artwork, or you may have the mundane task of creating an organization chart or laying out a new office space. For tasks like these, you probably don't want to learn a high-end drawing package such as CorelDraw or Adobe Illustrator.
You can take heart because there's a category of graphics software that can help you quickly produce drawings for general business use. In this review, we focus on Aldus Consumer Division's IntelliDraw 2.0, with a combined review of the Macintosh and Windows versions (which have identical functions and virtually the same interface).
These business graphics programs provide common drawing tools, stencils of common shapes, and "smart" features that keep the elements of your images in order. These products stress editing over drawing, so you can spend a little time manipulating objects rather than a lot of time creating them.
IntelliDraw 2.0 just missed our December 13, 1993, product comparison (page 56) of business graphics software, which included Meta Software Corp.'s MetaDesign 4.0 for Windows and MetaDesign 3.0 for Macintosh, Micrografx's SnapGrafx 1.0, and Shapeware Corp.'s Visio 2.0. (The last two are Windows products.)
At the time of that comparison we expected IntelliDraw to outperform the field, and the results of this review bear out our earlier opinion. IntelliDraw now owns top marks or ties for first place in eight of our 10 Report Card categories; IntelliDraw 2.0 is also the highest-scoring product that we've reviewed in this market.
FEATURES:
The first version of IntelliDraw introduced ingenious "sticky" connectors that kept objects aligned, distributed, and joined -- even as they were moved or manipulated. If you had to rearrange a flowchart, for example, you'd just drag tasks to their new positions and the connecting lines would automatically follow along. IntelliDraw 2.0 adds drag-and-drop templates, expanded file support and connectivity, and new special effects for objects and text.
Ready-made templates help you work faster because you don't have to draw from scratch or manually search clip-art libraries. At the same time, IntelliDraw provides a complete set of drawing tools that non-artists can master. For example, new warping envelopes and polymorphing let you create elaborate special effects -- such as stretched type and blended objects --...