Review: SmartDraw 7.1

SmartDraw 7.1 Suite Edition, $297
SmartDraw.com
San Diego, California
(800) 768-3729 
http://www.smartdraw.com/

I'm no artist by any means, but I find myself keeping half a dozen graphics programs of various sorts installed on my main development computer anyhow. Each one has its own place in my continuing quest to produce some sort of semi-attractive graphical content. SmartDraw is one program that I consistently turn to for business graphics, thanks to an easy to use interface and a huge library of handy symbols.

The basic paradigm here is similar to a batch of other drawing programs, including Visio: you drag symbols from a library and drop them on your drawing, where you can resize them, color them, move them around, connect them, and so on. But what makes SmartDraw stand out for me is that it's easy to come back to after long periods away without a huge learning curve, thanks to extensive (but not intrusive) help built right into the application. There are lots of helpful little wizards and step-by-step examples telling you what to do next when you want to do something like construct an organization chart, so you never need to poke around to remember how to get the results you need. Also very helpful is a library of tens of thousands of images - everything from cartoonish business clip art to networking symbols to maps (there's a huge library of maps new in this update) to nuts and bolts to gradients to flow chart shapes to bits of the human body to birds and beavers. This library comes in real helpful when you're trying to dress up a technical presentation to make it a tad less boring.

SmartDraw doesn't neglect the technical side of things either. One nice touch is that there are dozens of canned examples of finished diagrams that you can start from and alter for your own purposes - UML sequence diagrams, Gantt charts, logical network diagrams, and on and on. There are extensive tutorials showing how to put together floor charts, UML diagrams, greeting cards, forms, business process management diagrams, and so on - their Web site hosts much of this material, so they can slipstream improvements into the product. Other nice touches include publishing to HTML, support for OLE embedding in Office documents, and "design styles" that can format a whole drawing in a consistent fashion at one time.

Oh, and a note on pricing: while $297 is the usual price for the Suite Edition, they're running an online special until March 20; it's discounted to $197 until then. If you only need some of the functionality (floor plans, say, or UML diagrams) there are less expensive editions with only some of the symbol libraries. You can download a 30-day testdrive from the Web site as well.

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