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| SmartDraw 5 Professional Plus | Graphics & Presentations |
| Every lawyer knows the
importance of compelling graphics, whether for a trial, arbitration meeting or a simple
pitch to new clients. But most either can’t whip up these graphics themselves or don’t want to hand over their wallets to a professional artist. SmartDraw 5 Professional Plus provides you with an easy-to-use, cost-effective solution. This graphics and drawing program allows anyone with some aesthetic sense to create colorful, professional presentations. The program starts at $49 per license for the basic program and costs $199 per license for the deluxe Professional Plus Edition. At these prices, this program is hard to beat. It gives similar results as more-expensive art programs such as Adobe Illustrator, but isn’t as difficult to learn. After experimenting with it for three hours, I picked up the skills needed to draw graphic demonstrations such as evidentiary flow charts, accident scene diagrams and a crime scene diagram to scale. And these drawings didn’t look amateurish. They had colored backgrounds; multicolored clipart; text in various fonts, sizes and colors; and other design elements making my work look as professional as presentations I have paid graphic artists to create. All editions of the program come with collections of templates for drawing things such as the intersection of an auto accident, as well as clipart such as stop signs. The Professional Plus Edition is loaded with more than 2,000 templates and 30,000 symbols, which include clipart and individual graphics items. Its collections include flow charts, organizational charts and trees, networks, software design, engineering, floor plans and facilities, timelines and calendars, forms and maps. It also has a miscellaneous category with templates for drawing highway maps, accident scene diagrams, crime scene diagrams and other legal-specific items. Thus, you have resources to create whatever graphical demonstration you need. All these graphics can be made with a simple drag-and-drop. For instance, to create a flow chart, you can drag a shape, such as a square, from the toolbar, drop it in the workspace, create a line and attach it to the square. Repeating this a few times will yield a flow chart. You can make that chart go in a straight line by aligning the off-center boxes. Or you can make the flow chart head in different directions, such as making it go up and to the right, just like a staircase. You can do this and resize shapes without disconnecting the connected lines and shapes. If you want to use images instead of shapes, go to the extensive clipart collections and select the images that fit your needs. They, too, are just dragged from floating windows and dropped onto the desktop. When you have finished, you can print blowup versions of these demonstrative graphics. Or, in the Professional and Professional Plus Editions, you can actually drop such graphics into any OLE (object linking and embedding)-compatible program, such as PowerPoint or Sanction. Likewise, you could import graphics from any OLE-compatible program into your SmartDraw workspace. This opens an incredible universe of possibilities for adding materials not in the collections that come with the program. The only criticism I have is the absence of a good library of medical illustrations, and I would urge the company to add this type of library to its next version. Fortunately, for the time being, you can go online to grab illustrations to import into SmartDraw. While some of the basic functions mentioned can be done in PowerPoint and other programs, they can’t do as much as SmartDraw can. And it’s much cheaper and easier to use than programs such as Corel Corp.’s CorelDraw. SmartDraw is a wonderful tool with enough resources to meet the graphic arts needs of any lawyer or firm. |
SmartDraw.com (800) 501-0314 www.smartdraw.com Windows 95/98/2000/ME/NT Price: $198 per license for Professional Plus ($49 for basic version; $99 for Professional version) Reviewed by Bruce A. Olson, a shareholder and litigation attorney in the Green Bay office of the Milwaukee-based law firm of Davis & Kuelthau, S.C. PROS CONS VERDICT |
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