CorelFLOW!: For serious jobs and sheer fun

CorelFLOW!: For serious jobs and sheer fun

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Corel Corporation seems determined in becoming
the leader in the Windows-based graphics world. Here's one of its
products that I briefly mentioned some time ago in my review of
new products in the PC world. I got a copy of CorelFLOW! -- now in
Version 2.0 -- when Corel's Market Development Manager for
Australia, Asia and South Africa, Susan Englehutt, came to town
to give a presentation on CorelVENTURA 5.0 and the new stand-
alone version of CorelPHOTO-PAINT! 5.0.

In addition to its dominant stature in graphics illustration
and publication, Corel is also becoming the leader in PhotoCD
image collection. It is now hard for us to think of any area in
the graphics universe that this Ontario-based company has not
trodden into.

As can be expected, one of the biggest strengths found across
all Corel products is their tight integration with each other.
Take a look at the accompanying illustration, and you'll see the
familiar screen of CorelDRAW! 5.0, with its toolbar, color
palette and roll-ups, and it is actually CorelFLOW! 2.0.
Borrowed

When we talk about programs that do flowcharting,
organizational charts, schematics, etc., the name of a superb
charting program will immediately come to mind, namely, Visio. A
product of ShapeWare, it was the first of such programs that made
charts creation a snap. In Visio, symbols, or shapes, were
organized in the so-called stencils and all you have to do is
drag them and drop them on the drawing board. The grids, which
you can set up yourself, will organize the objects in place.

CorelFLOW! borrows this approach of organizing its humongous
collection of pre-drawn symbols into what it calls Smart Symbol
Libraries. My copy of the program, which comes in one CD ROM, has
more than 90 symbol libraries. There are libraries of symbols for
the floor plans, maps, bathroom, human bodies, human faces,
auditing, furniture, food, Gantt charts, structures, and organi
zations.

To create more than one copy of an object, all we have to do
is click on the symbol in the palette, the cursor will take the
shape of a stamp, and each time we click on the drawing page a
copy of the object is stamped.

More than shapes

Corel's strong foothold in the Kodak PhotoCD world is also
evident in this product. One of the symbol libraries contains
*.BMP version of some images of ancient places. In the CD ROM,
there are a great number of photo images in this file format.
These images can be found in Corel PhotoCD collections. Oddly,
though, CorelFLOW doesn't import files in PhotoCD formats
directly.

The program comes with loads of cliparts and 100 TrueType
fonts. But the biggest plus is perhaps its ability to create
multilayer diagrams. Now, let's suppose you have a set of dia
grams with varying degrees of details. You start with a birds-eye
view, then you can click on a particular object and CorelFLOW!
will jump to another diagram showing details of that particular
object.

The included Tutorial module of CorelFLOW! is a great example
of these linked diagrams. Click on a button, and you'll jump to
the next or previous section of the tutorial. This is truly a
very useful feature amidst the pizzazz and stuff. A parent ob
ject--a text object in a project file which contains a link to
another CorelFlow diagram--can even be linked to an application.
So, for instance, by double-clicking on a text object in a dia
gram, you can launch Winword and load a document file automati
cally.

The Barbie approach

Another interesting feature is the way we create cliparts of
people. CorelFLOW! has libraries for human faces, human bodies,
clothes, and even hair. The picture of the lady on the right
actually consists of three objects. First I dragged a symbol from
the WMN_BODY.SSL library. That gave me the body object complete
with skin color and underwear but without a head. I then dragged
a head from WMN_HEAD.SSL, put it above the neck of the body.

Finally, I opened the WMN_CLTH.SSL library, and dragged one of
the clothes symbols and dropped it over the body. The result is,
as you can see, in the illustration. If I don't like what I see,
I can delete the clothes object and drop another in its place.

The whole process reminded me of how my daughter Irene liked
to dress up her Barbie dolls. So I let her play around with the
program for a while, changing the clothes and the hairstyles of
the woman. She really had a tremendous amount of fun.

OLE 2.0

In-place editing is the way we integrate applications
nowadays. It's as simple as copying and pasting in two different
programs. If you want to have a CorelFLOW! drawing inside your
Ami Pro document, all you have to do is select the objects in
CorelFLOW!, copy them to the clipboard using the Copy command,
activate Ami Pro and paste the objects into your document using
the Paste Special command. I have tried this procedure in Ami Pro
3.1 with no problem at all, since this latest version already has
some degree of OLE 2.0 support. Ami Pro will automatically create
a frame for the OLE object.

With Winword 6.0, which is claimed to have full OLE 2.0
support, the operation is even more simple. All I have to do is
drag an object from CorelFLOW!'s screen and drop it in Winword.
Ami Pro cannot do this yet.

What does in-place editing actually mean? Well, if I'd like to
make some changes to the objects and I don't have CorelFLOW!
running, all I have to do is double-click on the object and it
will start CorelFLOW! for me. I still have to edit the objects in
its native program. When done, I click on the Update Object, a
typical OLE 2.0 menu item under File in CorelFLOW!. Everything is
automatic.

Full OLE 2.0 support will allow me to edit the object without
actually leaving the document. We'll explore this technology in
one of the upcoming articles.

Shortcomings

The first annoying problem I found was that the symbol
libraries were hard to identify. Guessing what the BATHROM1.SSL
library contains is not a challenge. But what might be the
contents of ELEC_MA4.SSL? And DEFAULT2.SSL? And MISC.SLL? And
there are so many of these cryptic names. How should I know what
symbol libraries to call up for my project? And each of these
libraries consumes about five percent of resources, and therefore
we cannot have too many of them open at the same time. There
should be a better way of managing the symbols so that we don't
have to look around for the symbols that we need.

Another related problem is that, at the 1024 by 768 resolu
tion, the symbols in the palette are a little bit too small to
identify. Often times I have to drag a symbol to the drawing page
before I can decide whether it is what I want.

Although it has all the basic tools for creating objects,
CorelFLOW! doesn't have fancy tools such as gradient fills,
blends, extrude, etc. This leaves me with the impression that the
people at Corel want you to have all of their great products if
you want to do a lot of different things. Well, that's a legiti
mate expectation. Of course, you can create everything in Corel
DRAW! that you can in CorelFLOW!, but without the Smart Symbol
Libraries it may take considerably longer to finish the same job.

Is it for you?

If your job description includes preparation of diagrams and
schematics, and you're familiar with CorelDRAW!, this US$99.00
program is for you. If you need to create tutorials that have a
lot of different diagrams, this one is definitely for you. Its
hypertext capability, with its parent and child object linking,
will help you prepare an easy-to-follow, effective electronic
tutorial.

However, if you don't need the ability to import bitmap
pictures and you have bad eyes, as I do, perhaps the more expen
sive (US$199.00) Visio is for you. Now in Version 3.0, this
leader of the pack has become even more efficient and easier to
use.