by Lynn Ginsburg
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but with allClear III, a flowcharting package, a few dozen well-chosen words can paint the picture for you.
AllClear takes a unique approach to flowcharting. It provides the standard graphical tools, but it adds a text-based scripting facility to build charts based on an outline. It also lets you use both tools, so you can switch freely between the two environments.
The script language is actually a handful of syntax rules involving punctuation marks. You can type directly in allClear or import an outline from another source. When you type a question in the script, the program creates a decision box on the graphical side and "yes'' and "no'' branches in the script. As you fill in the conditional branches, the appropriate boxes are added to the chart.
Creating a chart using only the program's drag-and-drop tools is somewhat less intuitive if you are unfamiliar with flowchart logic. For example, because the program is so strongly bound to flowcharting principles, removing a line that connects to a decision box causes the entire branch to disappear. There's sound logic behind this, but it's potentially confusing.
When creating a chart, you are presented with a choice of templates. You can choose a process tree, decision tree or org chart, or a fishbone diagram. If you don't know what kind of chart you'd like to create, you can choose a generic chart to get started.
Learning the scripting language forces you to understand the logic of a flowchart or decision tree. Once you have worked out this logic, the program does the drawing, placing and linking of graphical elements for you. However, you could create the same chart in a variety of other business graphics packages quite easily, using only drag-and-drop templates and automated graphics tools that help shorten the artistic learning curve.
When allClear generates a diagram, it is placed on a grid where columns can be inserted and deleted as needed.
If you reposition elements, they maintain their logical links, and you can also scale multiple objects simultaneously.
If you're already familiar with flowcharting, you'll be quite comfortable with allClear, and you'll enjoy its text or graphics options
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allClear III
Price: $299.95
Disk Space Required: 2MB
System Resources: 16%RAM: 4MB
Clear Software
800-338-1759, 617-965-6755
by Joel T. Patz
Whether you're a dabbler or a Degas, a world of smart-looking business graphics is just a few clicks away with ClarisImpact 2.0. You'll be able to instantly create sophisticated, high-quality charts, diagrams, tables, timelines and calendars just by flexing your finger on your mouse buttons. And if your artistic talents fall short of your aesthetic ambitions, you can tap into the program's library of 2,000 pieces of clip art, symbols, and chart and diagram styles.
If you need an organization chart to make your point, ClarisImpact offers five variations: Basic, Hierarchical, Left to Right, Market Segment and Responsibilities. Click on an insert button to expand the chart with additional levels or subordinate roles. To highlight a chart segment, you can easily change it to any color your only limitation is your computer's video card. Box styles can also be adjusted, or whip up your own customized chart by mixing and matching from the selection of box styles. Just about anything in the chart can be changed simply by selecting an item from a drop-down menu.
You'll find it amazingly effortless to prepare flowcharts for network diagrams, transportation, TQM and other applications. A complex layout takes only a few minutes using the library of symbols and connectors. If the symbol you need isn't in the library, this module is adequate to render simple drawings. For more complex objects, you'll probably want a more industrial-strength diagramming product.
Data charts take on new meaning and have greater impact with the treasure trove of ClarisImpact's tools. Chart styles offered in the opening dialog box Bar, Bar 3-D, Line, Pie and Pie Tilt are supplemented by several other styles from the Gallery section (Pictogram, Doughnut, X-Y). You can adjust the number of segments to fully present your data and edit values using a miniature spreadsheet-like grid that drops down and even lets you use some basic formulas such as sums. In addition to solid colors, you can choose two-color gradients, patterns, exploded segments and shadows to add impact to your graphics and command attention. Of all ClarisImpact's modules, this one offers the greatest variety and the widest range of control. It can be very addictive.
For timeline charts, ClarisImpact offers several styles for planning, tracking and overseeing the status of defined tasks. Choose overlapping or separate bar displays, and from a variety of bar-start and bar-end symbols. Establish task durations in hours, days, weeks, months, quarters and years. With a mouse click or two, you can instantly modify your chart by inserting or deleting tasks, or by changing the font style, size or color.
ClarisImpact also includes calendar templates. You can choose from monthly, weekly and yearly views, and take advantage of the program's myriad options to customize your calendar's appearance. For example, you can add banners and events specifying different looks for weekends and weekdays or even change the color of individual day blocks.
The program's ready-to-use slide-show formats will make your audience sit up and take notice. Design your presentation based on either elegant or lighthearted background styles. Take advantage of the font and color options, and you'll turn out a slick, professional-looking presentation. A slide sorter facilitates rearranging your slides. You can use the transition effects to move from one slide to the next or to build content like adding bulleted items to a slide one at a time. An outline view is available, and you can add speaker's notes to your show. It's easy to incorporate graphics you've created in other modules. For example, you can use a timeline to illustrate your project's progress together with other information presented as bulleted points.
For the nonartists among us, the menus, drop-down lists, dialog boxes and buttons make ClarisImpact a pleasure to use. With limited graphics expertise, you'll be able to produce high-quality, eye-popping output.
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ClarisImpact 2.0
Price: $129; upgrade, $59; competitive upgrade, $69
In Brief: For business and home-office users, ClarisImpact 2.0 is an extremely well-designed, versatile graphics package for creating and editing organizational, flow and data charts, slide presentations, network diagrams, timelines and calendars.
Claris Corp.
800-544-8554, 408-987-7000
by: Joel T. Patz
You need a flowchart--fast. Not just any flowchart, but a segmented diagram with curved lines, lots of different sized shapes and subdiagrams to illustrate the details. If this task sounds impossible, you haven't yet met up with DiagramIt.
DiagramIt is a very practical tool for designing charts, technical drawings, forms, family trees or just about anything you can think of. Within five minutes of installation, you'll be wondering how you got along without it. For business and home office users who question their graphics expertise, this program's flexibility and ease of use gets you from start to finish so quickly that you'll have time to pat yourself on the back for a job well done.
DiagramIt's Tool Bar and Object Bar put everything you need right on the drawing board. To add an object to a drawing, click on a shape--rectangle, triangle, polygon, ellipse or diamond--and point to where you want it to appear. You can resize an object or drag it to reposition it. If you want something special, you can import a bitmap into your diagram and then use DiagramIt to manipulate it. You can also export your DiagramIt creations to other applications.
Lines to connect your diagram's elements are available in different styles--solid, dashed, dotted, dashes and dots--and a variety of thicknesses. You can choose straight lines that are independent of objects, polylines that have two or more points beginning and ending in objects, or polysquarelines that maintain right angles as they bend. Lines can begin and terminate with arrows, boxes, diamonds and each can be solid or transparent. The same symbols can be attached to intermediate points of a multidirectional line. You can't, however, mix different symbols on the same line.
Adding text to your diagram isn't just easy, it's fun. You can locate text anywhere and then adjust it as you would any other object. You can tuck text inside shapes, or on top of or underneath lines. Dialog box selections let you rotate text to any angle, change the font and font size, change its color, pick an alignment and add effects such as underlining, italics or bold.
Only your video card limits your choice of background colors or the color of any object on the drawing board. If you decide to use special effects and apply shadowing to your shapes, choosing the color of the shadow can make a difference in your work's overall impact. Even before you choose a shape, you can pick its color and the color of the line surrounding it. If you're going to export the diagram into a black-and-white document, or if you don't have a color printer, simply toggle off the color to see it as a monochrome drawing. Diagrams tend to grow as you're working, so you can zoom in on sections of a diagram and work at a larger scale. Conversely, you can reduce the diagram's size so you can get an eyeful of what you've accomplished.
It's possible to animate a shape or line if you want to emphasize a portion of your work. The program's Status Box, movable anywhere on the screen, tells you which edit function, object shape, color and font are currently selected, a real plus when you're barreling along expressing your ideas. DiagramIt lets you add innumerable subdiagrams relating to a main diagram by using the Go To function. The supporting pieces can be identified with descriptions up to 128 characters long.
DiagramIt lacks a few key features. It doesn't have an undo feature other than Undo Delete, so it can be awkward to reverse mistakes. A snap to grid option would be helpful, too. Still, these are minor oversights. You'll create superior professional material with this well-designed, easy to learn, richly featured program. DiagramIt's intuitive interface, backed by context-sensitive help and a good user guide (if you need it), add to this charting program's outstanding ease of use.
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DiagramIt
Price: $47.48 (street)
In Brief: This is a feature-packed diagramming product for the business or home office.
Disk Space: 1MB
System Resources: 7% RAM: 4MB
Softcraft Technologies
206-643-7929
by: Joel T. Patz
If you're used to pats on the back from clients and colleagues for creating snappy four-color presentations peppered with 2-D bar charts and exploding pies—look out. They just might hoist you up on their shoulders after you whip together your next tour de force with Harvard ChartXL 2.0.
This outstanding graphing program's flexibility and seemingly endless options let you analyze, preview and present graphic interpretations of data with more depth and clarity than you thought possible.
You start ChartXL's ball rolling by selecting from one of its three chart categories: business, statistical or technical. When you pick one, a list of chart types associated with the category appears. Over 300 simple to complex graph types are available, many in 3-D. For example, for business data, you can choose from bar, pyramid, ribbon, candlestick and high/low/close charts; statistical data uses box-whisker, scatter, pareto and star charts; and technical information can be illustrated by polar, vector, XY, surface from triplets and shadow-contour charts.
Click on a chart type and a thumbnail is displayed. If it's not what you want, click on another. Press the Gallery button for an expanded set of variations along with the Advisor, which provides the chart type's name, its customary use and its physical characteristics.ChartXL makes it easy to associate data with a chart. Data can be imported from an Excel or Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, or you can link data in one of those spreadsheets to a ChartXL graph. You can also enter your data directly in the program's well-appointed spreadsheet. The Range Highlighter from the View menu ensures that your data is entered in the right cells and simplifies the process of changing axis labels, values, scanning order and direction, and adding axes to a chart.
The Formula Visualizer takes the drudgery out of creating curve or surface charts based on equations.As you work, you can choose to see only the spreadsheet data or the chart, or both. ChartXL's split screen lets you view updates in the chart as you enter or change the data.Powerful commands available on the Analysis toolbar enable you to develop statistical charts depicting linear, polynomial and cyclical trends, standard deviation and moving averages. You specify the calculation options and the data range to be used and ChartXL does the rest—quickly. You can even make data changes directly in some charts and perform "what-if" analysis by dragging the end of a column to a new point.Your chart's appearance is as important as the data it represents.
ChartXL is no slouch when it comes to good looks, too. Whether you want to spruce up the whole chart or just a part of it, a one-stop-shopping dialog box gives you complete editing control over line style, location of an axis, its scale and labels, grid lines, number format, color mapping and special enhancements for 3-D charts. The Rotation toolbar lets you rotate, tilt and change a chart's size with or without changing its perspective.You can exercise your creativity by adding, changing or moving text, pictures and other objects. Use the drawing tool to add aor curve anywhere on the chart page. Greek characters, mathematical symbols, super- and subscript text, fonts and font attributes, text alignment, fill patterns and color choices are just a menu choice or right-click away. You can preview a chart in color or black and white before saving your changes and printing.
This 32-bit application is OLE 2.0 compliant and Microsoft Office 95 certified. In addition to Windows 95, it runs under NT and Windows 3.1 using Win32s v1.3 (included). The user guide is well written and the program's contextual and online help is excellent. Feature-packed and easy to use, Harvard ChartXL 2.0 allows you to analyze, manipulate and communicate data so effectively, you'll wonder how you did without it.
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Harvard ChartXL 2.0 for Windows 95
Price: $149; upgrade from Harvard ChartXL 1.0, Microsoft Office and Lotus 1-2-3, $79 Win 95 Software
In Brief: ChartXL is an outstanding application for creating business, financial, technical and statistical graphs.
Disk Space: 5MB (14MB recommended)
System Resources: NA RAM: 4MB (8MB recommended)
Software Publishing Corp.
800-234-2500, 408-986-8000
by James E. Powell
Visio 4.0 just keeps getting better. This time around, both Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 versions of Visio ship in the same box. And there's a slew of enhancements that will be most appreciated by Windows 95 users.
Visio 4.0 has new and better templates, easier data assignment to objects and a new summation tool for quick totals of numbers associated with selected objects. Also included are Wizards for page layout, org charts and timelines.
The program's interface has been tweaked, too. Stencil toolbars which contain the basic charting shapes and are organized by category can now float or be docked. They also attach to a document, so they're at hand and ready to use when you open the document.
New Wizards automatically generate org charts using Excel or ASCII files or text you type. You can select a style and resize the chart to fit on a single page. A sample Excel spreadsheet is supplied, so you can just fill in the cells or use the Wizard to create a file on the fly. The Timeline Wizard treats project timelines similarly. After your org chart or timeline has been generated, you're returned to the familiar Visio editing environment to make adjustments.
Since the earliest versions of the program, Visio's SmartShapes have facilitated adding text boxes, controlling the way a shape grows and adding connection points. A new tool in this version creates curved shapes.
Custom Properties remedies a shortcoming of the previous edition of Visio and makes it easier to attach data to a shape. Though not fully implemented in the beta I tested, most of the predefined shapes will have logical fields you can fill in. The org chart stencil I used contained predefined fields for department and telephone number. You can add your own properties through the ShapeSheet an intimidating screen, but you can skip to the bottom to add your own text fields.
Visio 4.0 offers new operations for multiple objects. You can fragment shapes, use union to create a new shape from two others, or create a shape based on the intersection of other objects. Version 4.0's user-defined fixed grid maintains grid spacing when you zoom in or out. A spell checker and conversion filters for ABC FlowCharter and CorelFlow have also been added, along with a new feature that lets you create a layer that will appear on screen but won't print.
Visio offers a number of minor, yet quite useful, new features. For example, the File/Open dialog box now shows preview images. Drag scraps portions of a drawing to the Windows 95 desktop and use them in other applications. The program maintains its switchable interface that can mimic Microsoft Office, Lotus SmartSuite or Novell's PerfectOffice. Visio also promises the shipping version of the program will include a format painter that will let you lift formatting characteristics from one object and apply them to another.
Visio has always been a leader in supporting new Microsoft technology, and version 4.0 is no exception. The Windows 95 version of the program includes support for Microsoft Office 95's Binder and nets a 20 percent performance improvement as a result of its 32-bit architecture, according to the company. Even in the beta that I tested, I noticed the performance gains. Other Windows 95 compatibility features include support for long filenames, Quick View previewing from Explorer, right mouse-button menus and multitasking.
Visio 4.0 provides plenty of help, mostly in the form of pop-up windows and tool tips. When your cursor lingers over a connecting point, for example, a help window will appear with tips on how to use such points.
Visio is still not a beginner's tool. But if you have some experience with diagramming programs, its abundant features and advanced operations make it ideal for sophisticated charts, network diagrams or space-planning illustrations.
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Visio 4.0 Price: $149 (street)
In Brief: Visio's new Wizards, improved user interface and custom properties are among the highlights of this new Windows 95 version.
Visio Corp.
800-24VISIO, 206-521-4500.