CorelDraw 9 Office Edition

CorelDraw 9 has been around some time, but this Office Edition is new. It is for anyone running a small business, from the office or home, and is an illustration and page layout utility simplifying the creation of reports, charts, presentations and web pages.

There are four CDRoms. The first is a basic but helpful multimedia guide to CorelDraw and well worth a look. Another holds 25,000 clipart images, symbols and fonts, also printed in the colour catalogue. A third installs the program, which takes up a whopping 176Mb, and the fourth stores additional effects and tools you may wish use later.

CorelDraw 9 Office Edition is basically a cut-down version of its big brother, the Graphic Suite. It doesn't include the Photopaint image editing program or power features such as colour separation for professional printing, but you do get a useful bitmap editor for editing, enhancing and generally tweaking pictures.

Importantly, this edition supports vectors - a way of scaling images without losing resolution - and layers, so images can be laid on top of each other and edited independently. Transparencies, gradient fills and drop shadows are a few of the available effects.

More than 70 popular (and some obscure) file formats are supported to ensure compatibility with other graphics programs, so passing on and sharing your work shouldn't be a problem. When working on a project, image files can be imported direct from a scanner or a digital camera. Alternatively, files on your computer's hard disk can be dragged and dropped on the page.

Although CorelDraw is not a freehand sketching tool, you can create your own pictures from scratch. Artistic Media smooths and perfects your shakiest freehand shapes and you can easily apply pleasing effects. The Eyedropper tool lets you lift a colour from any area of a picture and paste it anywhere else, and the Text tool lets you insert fully editable text wherever you like.

The accompanying help is disappointing - the manual doesn't even cover installation - but there are text-based Tutors in the application to help you with common tasks such as customising fax headers, putting together a newsletter or printing the finished product. A little more interactivity or a spot of animation wouldn't have gone amiss, but we can't fault the Tutors. Even a beginner could, we feel, turn out professional-looking work with only a little practice.

The Publish To Web wizard automatically converts pretty much anything into a fully functioning web page ready for online glory. Publish To PDF, on the other hand, converts your document into a file that can be read by Adobe Acrobat, a good way of ensuring that anybody can access your work whether they use a PC or a Mac. The latest version of Acrobat is included.

Cumulus Desktop is a separate tool that catalogues images and sound and video clips, and Corel Presentations is an application designed to produce professional presentations. As with the main program, there are decent business templates to get you started.

Office Edition successfully pulls together various aspects of desktop publishing for its chosen market, so the small business can publish creative work without a fleet of graphic designers.

Price £316 UKP (£175 as upgrade)ContactCorel 0800 581028

Features

• Image editing and drawing from scratch
• Drag-and-drop page layouts
• 500 business-orientated templates and 25,000 clipart images
• Easy publishing on paper or the webli>Compatible with many other applications and file formats