Dave Andrews
Give the people what they need. That's the philosophy behind several new Windows drawing programs designed for people whose artistic capabilities are nil, yet who still need to quickly create professional-looking diagrams and charts. You won't find some of the high-end features (e.g., support for Bˇzier curves, gradient fills, or special text effects) in ShapeWare's Visio 2.0 or Micrografx's SnapGrafx that you find in free-form, professional drawing programs. Instead, these programs are for business users who are often called on to create network diagrams, flowcharts, project time lines, and organizational charts for incorporation into reports or presentations.
"To a large degree, the target users of Visio 2.0 are quite different than those of CorelDraw," says Morgan Brown, Visio pr
oduct manager, noting that with a professional drawing program, you're more likely to create unique artwork or designs. "Visio is a program that helps you quickly draw the basic types of drawings that are used in a company. Prepress color processing is not something our target users are going to do," he says.
Both Visio and SnapGrafx use templates to jump-start you into the graphics creation process. Instead of having to create and link the arrows, symbols, and text boxes that you will use in an organizational chart or network diagram, the templates do much of that work for you. Each template provides a library of predrawn shapes and a framework for performing a specific task so that objects interact as you would expect them to. For example, in the creation of a flowchart, when you move a box, the link moves with it; when you select a shape and begin typing, the text is automatically inserted. Although these hand-holding features are not as dazzling as those that you might find in a 24-bit color paint
program, they help in speeding the process along. You can use either of these programs to create respectable drawings in just 5 minutes.
While the two programs were developed to fulfill the need for quick-and-clean graphics, Visio 2.0 is more extendable than SnapGrafx. Visio 2.0 is an OLE 2.0 object and a container that also supports OLE 2.0 automation. In addition, ShapeWare has developed a catalog of optional symbol libraries for specific industries or themes. However, because of SnapGrafx's template gallery, which shows up each time you start the program, SnapGrafx makes it easier for you to get started on your drawing.
Gordon Sellers, product manager for SnapGrafx, says Micrografx designed the program to appeal to everyone in a business, from administrators to the company president. "There is a huge group of people [in business] out there who have very specific needs," he says. He said that although suites of applications are a great way for companies to buy their spreadsheet, database, word
processor, mail, and presentation programs, these packages don't sufficiently address all the common business graphics needs.
Other companies have noticed this untapped market as well. AutoDesk's AutoSketch 2.0, a 2-D CAD program for creating technical illustrations, also includes predesigned templates to minimize repetitive tasks. IntelliDraw 2.0, Aldus's full-featured drawing program for the Mac and Windows, offers predefined templates and collections of smart objects. Microsoft has acknowledged that a number of people use presentation programs to create organizational charts. The company is including a special version of Banner Blue's Org Plus as a standard feature in PowerPoint 4.0 for Windows, which is expected to ship this month.
Screen: This diagram of a sports play was made in 3 minutes in SnapGrafx. Once the first player was placed and sized, every new player selected from the template sized itself accordingly.
Screen: This recycling symbol was created in Visio
2.0 in about 20 minutes. The predrawn arrows were modified using the line tool and fragment command and then rotated using the rotation tool. The program's grid helped in aligning the arrows.
Screen: Along with its high-end CAD features, AutoSketch includes predesigned templates.
Screen: IntelliDraw 2.0, expected to ship in December, will ship with general and dedicated templates for constructing diagrams, such as this network chart.
Graphics Gets Down to Basics
