Product: CorelDraw 9 - Office Edition
Company: Corel Corporation
Website: http://www.corel.com
Estimated Street Price: $249.00 Upgrade: $169.00
Review By: Julien Jay

Introduction

CorelDraw for Windows was introduced in January 1989 (in fact CorelDraw was the first Windows compliant software that Bill Gates has presented to the world!), and quickly established a dominant position in the PC graphics market. The application has evolved from a collection of graphics applications with broad market appeal to a targeted professional design tool for graphic designed and desktop publishers. CorelDraw 9.0 Office Edition is a package containing the award winning Corel Draw 9 software, Corel Presentations 9 and some other different utilities. Small offices often need to create easily and quickly high impact documents or presentations for their everyday needs, with affordable software. Also corporate users have limited time to spend learning new software, that’s why this office edition is more easy to use than never. Until now they can use Microsoft Publisher or Microsoft PowerPoint…but Corel unveils its solution for them: CorelDraw 9 Office Edition. As we have already reviewed CorelDraw 9 we will only present you the new features of this office release including Corel Presentations 9.

Setup

As all the Corel software the setup is very reliable, customizable and user-friendly. During the setup you can choose which components you want to install including: Fonts, Clipart, Digital camera support (About more than 150 recognized cameras), Text import filters & Graphic import/export filters and obviously the small productivity components such as Corel Capture. The setup will guide you efficiently and will install quickly this new software suite (be sure to have a fast CD-Rom drive: with a 24x it takes about one hour; with a 40x it’s done in 25 minutes). At the end of the setup, the Corel software registration will start and when you’ll have successfully registered your new software (with else modem, internet or printer) you’ll receive an URL to freely download some picture arts. At the end of the setup you’ll be prompted to reboot. Once Windows 98 as started, the Corel setup will finish registering its components. Then you’ll see a ‘Corel city’ shortcut on your desktop that will connect you to the Corel web site. To launch CorelDraw 9 you simply have to locate it in the Corel program start menu.

What are the differences between CorelDraw 9 and CorelDraw 9 Office?

CorelDraw 9 latest SP1 build is 9.397. CorelDraw 9 Office reviewed build is 9.456. So as you guess there are some differences. CorelDraw 9 Office edition contains new features:

• Send feature that allows you to send a Draw 9 picture directly on the default MAPI client.

• Microsoft Word 2000 toolbar integration: Draw 9 Office adds a Corel button to your Word 2000 toolbar that open CorelDraw 9 office in your Microsoft Word software thanks to its OLE 2 technology,

• Organization chart wizard that allows you to create your own and high-end organization charts with a few mouse clicks (like in Visio),

• CorelDraw 9 Office now contains in the same software a lighted version of PhotoPaint 9.0 named Bitmap editor
• New opening wizard that allows you to create instant document by using the very beautiful included models for websites, graphs, adds, announcements, labels and much more…