Office 2000 Premium Part II: Design with Publisher, FrontPage, and PhotoDraw PhotoDraw--The Microsoft Way To Edit Images Douglas Smith
What's New? PhotoDraw 2000 Version 2 (PhotoDraw) is an easy-to-use image editing and drawing tool by Microsoft which nicely complements the Office 2000 suite. Like many of the other enhanced tools in the Office suite, PhotoDraw incorporates many of the new team concepts that have been incorporated throughout this update. You can easily apply PhotoDraw-based graphics to any Office documents or directly to Web pages created with FrontPage 2000. Note that PhotoDraw is only included in the Premium Edition of Office 2000, and not in the Standard or even Professional editions.
New in this version of PhotoDraw are Region Copy and Crop which allows quick toolbar access to drag selected areas of a picture to copy or crop, along with Batch Save and Conversion which takes many steps out of saving multiple images to the same format. PhotoDraw also incorporated the ability to Save to Web server functions which makes it easy to store and share images on a Web server, just like other applications in the suite.
There are several new image and drawing tools added to this version, such as a new Format Painter, Embed effect, Starburst effect, Glow effect, and Styles. These new features allow the graphics designer to create custom looks and apply to any object within a project. There are also over 500 tileable textures and 150 built in Web effects now to enhance your Web pages and the new stamping tool making repetitive imaging creation a snap. Probably the best new enhancement is the ability to open, edit, and save images to HTML pages and create rollover buttons and animated GIF files.
Working with images is a big plus for any product of this type and PhotoDraw won't disappoint you here either with its new Image slice which allows you to slice a Web page to reduce graphic size to create space for text and other elements. You can also now assign URLs to graphic, image, drawn objects or text creating image maps that allow you to click on a graphic and be whisked off to a new Web site. Browser preview is now supported, as is the uncanny ability to edit images directly from Microsoft Internet Explorer and save back to the Web page, based on authorization, of course. This is a great improvement to say the least.
We have talked about the ability of all Office 2000 applications to share resources across the board and PhotoDraw will allow you to now send and edit graphics to FrontPage, while utilizing colors and themes from the same. You can even save directly to PowerPoint now as backgrounds using the one button save and send feature.
The Good and the Bad PhotoDraw is an exceptionally easy to use application. Even a beginner can use the Wizards to create very nice graphics in no time. With very little practice will allow you to start creating rather complex banners and signs or just modify images. The ability to share across the board with other applications such as Word and FrontPage makes Web page development a snap and transition between the other products of the Office 2000 suite is excellent. Older versions of PhotoDraw required a lot of resources to run and tended to run slower than this version. We found this to be the smoothest of them all as far as operation goes, and speed was not an issue here at all!
The many new features and improvements are great while we found Visual Menus a real plus, helping you to find features without memorizing graphic terminology. This is an area where many other graphics programs could learn a lesson--it really makes getting around effortless. The familiar Office 2000 interface is great, it seems like the world is using Microsoft Office in some capacity or the other. The many Templates and Wizards were also key here in making operation of PhotoDraw a real snap, just click on a selection from the menu and up comes the Wizard to guide you along the way.
While PhotoDraw was a great product to use and didn't show any signs of faltering at all, there were some things that we felt could be improved such as transition speed between it and FrontPage. Products such as Macromedia DreamWeaver and Fireworks just seem to work a bit better together and even though this version of PhotoDraw was the fastest yet, other products that we tested did work a lot faster both loading and multitasking with other tools in there suite.
How Does It All Stack Up? PhotoDraw is an excellent package any user will feel confident using it. In the past, comparison with other products in its class was a joke but the new and very improved PhotoDraw 2000 is an up and coming application. Other products such as Corel Draw, Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Fireworks, and HotDog Professional will get the job done and in most cases better with more control. However, with other professional graphic programs there is still a certain amount of learning necessary and most novice users will shudder at the thought of creating images using them. With PhotoDraw 2000 this just isn't the case. A lot of thought went into the development of this product and ease of use seems to have been the number one objective. Kudos go out to the Microsoft folks for not letting us down one bit. If you were like me and kept away from image work in the past don't hesitate on this one because you may be pleasantly surprised. PhotoDraw is perfect for the novice or casual user, and the integration with other Office programs is, as usual, very good.
