![]() My stakeholders don’t want to see wiring diagrams for electrical installations – and neither do I. The analysis tools like Ishikawa diagrams are great but I don’t have cause to use them much now I no longer work with Six Sigma. There is a lot of functionality in SmartDraw that I would never use. Having said that, I do have the oldest version of MS Office known to man so that may have been the reason that the packages were incompatible. ![]() The options for exporting into PowerPoint and Excel were greyed out, maybe because of the templates I was working with but maybe because it wasn’t available. ![]() I went back and added these in and was pleased that they were automatically in a complementary colour and font. pdf with one click, but the document looked pretty boring and would have benefited from a title and footers. I tried to export my image as a Word document and that seemed to create an application error, crashing the program and losing my changes. That is, assuming that you know exactly what the process steps are. I then played with the colours and ended up with a rainbow of process steps, and the whole thing was done in minutes. That was a lot easier to do as SmartDraw can put the connectors in for you and ensure the process steps are lined up on the page. I also designed a flow chart to show the process for borrowing a book from the library and then returning it, paying a fine if necessary. I wasn’t that bothered by perfect scale, and it shows! If you were a professional landscape gardener and you wanted to spend the time sizing each item for the plans for a client, then you could do it. Nothing like the example, as that was to scale with the building included as well. My garden picture, as you can see, turned out OK. It’s not a hardship, but I do like my keyboard and mouse shortcuts to remain the same between applications. Instead I had to copy and paste a new image and then drag it to the right place. The other thing I found missing from SmartDraw’s controls was the ability to hold down Ctrl and move the mouse to drag and drop a copy. Maybe it does, but I was too lazy to find out and just dropped more detail on the top and deleted the underneath layer. In PowerPoint you have the option to bring graphic to the front to easily manage layers and I was hoping SmartDraw would have a similar function. SmartDraw does work with layers and when I wanted to add colour to my borders I found that the colour blocked out the plants underneath. I selected icons from the menu and with drag and drop put decking, a table, a shed, fences, lawn and borders into my garden relatively easily. How hard could it be?Īctually, it wasn’t that hard. There are examples available but none of them were an exact match to my garden so I took a blank sheet and decided to do it from scratch. It was easy to choose a template for landscape design. I’m hoping it’s not too late to set another seed off. Maybe it was slugs, maybe it was lack of water. ![]() By the way, one of those pea plants that have come up has died. On top of the standard stuff they also have a healthcare and a legal version, with specific templates for those industries. You can even do your family tree or plan how to hang your clothes in your wardrobe. Authority matrices for stakeholder management.Network design (cool little pictures of servers and firewalls).Flow charts (lots of options including UML and data flow for those business analysts among you).Gantt and PERT charts (not sure why you would want a drawing package for those).There are templates for every conceivable business purpose including: Once the application opens, it bemuses you with a huge range of templates. You could interpret this as a plus point, but I thought the installation package should have done a better job at managing my expectations. It’s a 3gb installation so I figured it would take some time on my old PC and went to put the kettle on. When I put the SmartDraw 2008 CD in my PC, the installation window told me it would take 51 minutes to install. I decided to put this to the test myself. It makes it easy to design “presentation-quality” graphics in “minutes, not hours.” SmartDraw is, according to the manufacturer, the world’s most popular business graphics software.
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