REVIEW: SmartDraw 2008

SmartDraw, from the company of the same name that was founded in 1994, is an application for designing and producing business graphics of all kinds:

• Charts and graphics, including Gantt charts
• Calendars
• Certificates
• Organizational charts
• Landscape plans
• Maps, including US and world maps
• Math and scientific graphics, including astronomical charts

There’s many more categories of graphics that SmartDraw supports: I count 25 graphics categories and also 17 categories of graphics based on activities (accounting, engineering, human resources, quality management and more). With this in mind, let’s take a look at SmartDraw and see where it lies in the landscape of creative professional software.

PC only

I don’t review many products that are PC-only, usually because the Mac is an important part of the creative professional market. However, SmartDraw is a little different because I believe it’s targeted more toward users outside of the corporate creative departments, those who need graphics for PowerPoint presentations and papers but don’t know the difference between Photoshop and Illustrator. I am all for that, since my experience in the corporate world is that quick and dirty graphics such as a chart for PowerPoint don’t need to be Illustrator masterpieces—besides, PowerPoint doesn’t do much to make presentations into masterpieces anyway. With SmartDraw, anyone on the corporate ladder can generate practically any kind of graphics they need, and they look sharp—things like ImageChartsâ„¢ and Live Maps put a lot of power in the graphics. But SmartDraw doesn’t offer as much control as a program like Illustrator, where graphics are made from scratch (more on this below).

The SmartDraw toolbar practically mimics what you’ll find in Microsoft Office 2007/2008.

Click a tab and you’ll see buttons for various commands. Here you can see the Chart Type selections within the Chart tab.

The SmartDraw interface will remind you a great deal about another PC-centric application: Microsoft Office. The tabbed menu design and small icon toolbar at the very top are both practically the same construction for both applications. There’s pros and cons to this: I am not particularly happy with the tabbed menu structure, because you can only see a few tools at any one time. Applications like Photoshop have some items in drop-down menus (essentially making them usable only on-demand) while some items such as tools and tool settings are available all the time in the toolbar and panels. Adobe CS3 applications are also very customizable, not only with the panels which can be moved or hidden but also menu items and keyboard shortcuts that have been customizable for a few years now. SmartDraw and Office menus can’t be customized as far as I can tell, which will bother creative professionals used to CS3 but probably won’t be noticed by its intended users. That brings up the major benefit of mimicking the Office interface: almost all of SmartDraw’s users rely on Office for their computer work so having practically the same interface in SmartDraw makes a lot of sense.

Maybe the most templates I’ve seen

This is one of SmartDraw’s organization chart templates.

I’m not even going to try to count the number of templates in SmartDraw—the Web site says there’s “hundreds,” and I definitely believe it. The breadth of templates may be SmartDraw’s biggest value: charts and graphics of all types are available rather quickly just by selecting them out of the template window. They’re well-organized too, with a sidebar that changes depending on whether you want to search by activity or by chart type. You can also search for templates and access your previous files. I’ve always been a little miffed with Adobe software because goodies like templates and such are usually in a separate folder and not necessarily installed or easy to find. SmartDraw puts its templates right in front of your face, and does it upon startup which is cool. Adobe is starting to get it with applications like Dreamweaver, which offers a variety of CSS templates when a user wants a new file, but if CSS templates were easy to design I doubt Dreamweaver would serve up templates so easily.

Another one of SmartDraw’s templates.

Now on to the revisions….

I have a hard time revising things in SmartDraw, probably because I am used to the control I have in Photoshop, Illustrator and other applications. Making a chart based on a template is very easy, but revising it is a different matter. Text revisions and drawing basic shapes and lines are fine, but there is no tool to rotate elements—there’s a Rotate button, but charts are considered one big element so you can’t rotate a single item like the chart legend, nor can you move it to another place or even tweak its position. To get around this, look for Rotate Chart in the Chart tab and you can reconfigure your chart in a new orientation, and the elements move accordingly. The Chart tab also has several other buttons for modifying your chart—add series and categories, change the chart type and modify the labels and such. However, for most buttons you’ll only have three or four options and for me that just isn’t enough. Ironically, the SmartDraw development team told me they designed the software purposely to disallow such minute control over specific elements, and there are more chart controls available then they had planned to provide. It goes to show you that SmartDraw is a different breed of application than other creative pro apps. Here’s what the development team says:

I use Illustrator for my graphs and charts: since CS2 it’s had a Graph feature that allows you to work with an embedded spreadsheet and generate dynamic charts. It has nine chart types compared to SmartDraw’s five, though charts are only a small part of SmartDraw’s template offering. But in any case, if you are a perfectionist or particular about your graphics, SmartDraw might not be the right fit for you. If you like what you find in the templates and you don’t need to modify anything other than the text and/or content, then SmartDraw is a better fit.

You can export your SmartDraw graphics to most Microsoft Office applications, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint. This works very well. You can also export a PDF, which gave me the idea to make a PDF and pop it into Illustrator for further editing. The PDF export dialog box actually has the option to export to several standard formats including Illustrator, EPS, TIFF, JPEG, HTML and PDF and many more! I tried exporting JPEG, PDF and AI files and it took a little while but I did get three workable files, but there were a few minor problems with each:

• The JPEG had some artifacting around the text that I didn’t expect since I exported at full quality
• The PDF worked well in Acrobat but couldn’t display the font when brought into Illustrator
• The AI file probably worked the best of them all. The only problems were that it converted the font into Helvetica and rounded shapes were drawn with a bunch of points rather than three, making it look rough

Conclusion

Every now and then I review software that doesn’t quite fit the creative professional mold—I think SmartDraw is one of them. As the development team told me, SmartDraw’s templates are its strength and its weakness is the lack of fine control, though for some users that can be a benefit. For people who need to generate clean, powerful graphics quickly and want nothing more than to pick a template, fill in the text and send it along to Microsoft Office, SmartDraw will work great for you and I recommend it. If you’re a creative professional who is more at home with Photoshop and Illustrator and who wants total control over your graphics then I think you should stick with Illustrator or other vector drawing applications. If your business graphics are going to Microsoft Office, SmartDraw is definitely a step up for you, but if your graphics are going to InDesign or Quark documents then SmartDraw can probably do what you need but it may not quite end up the way you want it to. So in the end I think SmartDraw 2008 serves a particular need for a particular kind of user—whether you are one of those users is up to you to decide.

SmartDraw 2008
Available at www.smartdraw.com
Price: $297 for one user, $1,485 for five, $2,970 for ten or $2,995 for unlimited users
Rating: 7/10