SmartDraw 6 Professional Plus Review No Longer Uncharted Territory Eric Grevstad
Mon 11/25/02 -- It may not be scientific, but we've always thought one measure of a program's ease of use is how quickly you can not only get comfortable but get silly with it. Within a few minutes of installing SmartDraw.com's SmartDraw 6 Professional Plus, we'd poked through a handful of templates and examples, selected the diagram for a police or insurance report of "Accident -- Freeway Offramp," dragged a couple of cars and trucks into position, typed in route numbers ... and gone on to decorate the accident scene with clip art of ambulance workers and a fleeing suspect in a jalopy with "Just Married" sign on the bumper. After that, we customized a company org chart by replacing one executive's box with a bathroom fixture from SmartDraw's floor-plans menu.
If you haven't guessed, SmartDraw 6 is a business illustration program that's friendly enough to let the least artistic user combine lines and shapes into good-looking organizational or flow charts, diagrams, floor plans, calendars, timelines, or signs for printing or pasting into Word documents or PowerPoint slides. Sold via the Web, it fits a niche between the general-purpose artistry of CorelDraw and the powerful but daunting drafting-table toolkit of Microsoft's Visio -- if the latter borders on professional CAD, SmartDraw is sort of a business cousin to drag-and-drop, template-based consumer doodlers like Broderbund's The Print Shop.
SmartDraw 6 is a better bargain than Visio, too, although only the least demanding draftspersons will be satisfied by the $69 SmartDraw base package -- the latter lacks such fundamental functions as layers, gradient-fill alternatives to solid colors, a spelling checker, and the ability to create your own shapes, all part of the $129 SmartDraw 6 Professional edition we'd recommend.
The latter also comes with your choice of one of the company's 11 collections or libraries of drawing templates and drag-and-drop shapes -- business charting; architectural floor plans; maps; network design; software design; electrical engineering; mechanical engineering; science and math; clip art and flyers; home and leisure; or an extensive set of medical/anatomical drawings.
If you're content with a single specialty, the $129 SmartDraw Professional can be a tempting alternative to the $499 Visio Professional, which includes the software-diagramming, engineering, and floor-plan functions left out of the $199 Visio. If you'd like all 11 libraries -- some 50,000 symbols and templates in all -- you can get them in the SmartDraw Professional Plus pack priced at $198 (and definitely bulky enough to order on CD rather than as a download).
