Harvard Draw Has Quality Features but Ease-of-Use Could Improve

Last week I took a look at Micrografx's Windows Draw, a low-priced, but capable, competitor to CorelDraw. A day after I wrote the review, I received a beta version of Software Publishing Corp.'s Harvard Draw for Windows.

In terms of features, Harvard Draw is definitely a high-end program, like Corel. It has all the racy capabilities you'd expect in a $595 drawing program: an auto-trace function for importing bit maps, a measuring tool that gives you quasi-CAD capabilities, and just about all the other drawing tools you get from Corel and Micrografx.

Lots of features, too many options. In the ease-of-use department, the program isn't quite up to the powerful simplicity of Micrografx's Windows Draw. All of the major tools are listed in the left-side tool palette, and the presence of two different selection tools (a "pick paths" tool and a "pick points" tool) makes things a bit confusing. To be fair, CorelDraw can seem equally dense to the first-time user.

Neither the path nor the point tools let you resize an object, by the way. You need to choose the resize tool to do that.

Basically, this program is a lot more difficult to use for basic...