Designed with the small business in mind, Corel Print Office 2000 makes it easy to create polished documents and impressive Web pages. The package includes the following components:

Corel Print Office 5
Corel Photo House 2.1
Corel Web Designer 2
Corel Central 9

In addition, you can choose a custom install routine and select from 25,000+ clipart images, 10,000+ photos, 300 fonts, and Web-specific images. Also, Corel provides additional drag-and-drop templates and a huge selection of images downloadable from their Web site, www.corel.com/printoffice.

As many of you probably know, the very early days of computer desktop publishing was the arena in which Apple machines really shined, driven in no small part by the early success of desktop publisher vendors choosing to write their software for the Apple operating system (OS). Gradually, desktop publishing entered the pc arena, as vendors began to expand their software offerings for pc's and as the Windows OS continued to improve and provide an equally excellent operating system to support this dynamic style of computer programs.

On the readily available retail market today, there must be at least twenty different desktop publishing applications written for the pc, with fewer and fewer available for the Apple system. When Microsoft's successful Publisher program first hit the market with its very competitive street price and attractive array of features, the interest in this genre of software really exploded, and the number of people interested in working with brochures, flyers, newsletters, business cards, and banners really began to grow. Now, customers have a full range of these applications from which to choose, at many price points. 

While top-of-the-line Quark Express and Corel's own Ventura continue to command attention (and challenge the pocket book), slowly over the years we have witnessed a growing number of easily affordable desktop publishing applications clearly designed for a home user or an owner of a small business. In these cases, these targeted customers are interested in flexibility, design choices, and a selection of already designed templates, all geared to help speed up their work, provide a minimal learning curve, while generally costing less than $100. All these vendors provide nice applications that are equally focused on this defined customer.

Corel's Print Office 2000 is for the home-office user wanting to quickly and easily create professional-looking documents. Specifically, the program is tailor made for an office environment of ten or less employees, usually having limited exposure to desktop publishing concepts and techniques, and limited time to produce professional material.

For Existing Users of Print Office or Other Corel Design Products

For existing users of Print Office, this new version 2000 does not provide many new features, but one tool, Shading, lets you change the color but maintain all the tonal values in imported vector clip art. The interface has also been tweaked, and you can now drag and drop clip art, photos, and templates from the Notebook directly into the workspace.

Users of Corel's very impressive, and very upscale Corel Ventura or Corel Draw programs will likely not need Print Office 2000, as these other top-of-the line Corel products far exceed Print Office with their many extra features and capabilities, as well as their equally challenging learning curves and steeper price points.

(Note: Click on the Reviews link in the left frame of this Web site, for a link to a review of Corel Draw 9 Graphics Suite.)

New Features

The new IXLA integration is a new feature in Print Office that lets you use the Notebook to preview and import images from a scanner or digital camera, a smart move in today's rapidly growing interest in digital cameras. The newly added templates, which strike a more professional design note, are also a plus.

Using technology originally developed for Corel Draw, Print Office delivers robust design and drawing tools, including true bezier-curve editing. However, Print Office does lack some features and automated design help that can be found in Publisher 2000 or iPublish. For example, though you can save font attributes as a preset, you still have no way to save paragraph-level formatting.

The bundling of the programs offers a great value to the user. The included Photo House 2.1 now supports multi-layered images, so you can rearrange a composition and even edit text without degrading image quality. Also, Photo House offers a new preview for Web output that lets you judge the tradeoffs between compression and quality for GIF and JPEG images.

The suite's earlier organizer, Colleagues and Contacts, has been replaced with Corel Central 9, the same robust address book and scheduler that ships with Corel's Word Perfect Office Professional 2000. The Web Designer is an HTML editor that can be used to tweak HTML tagging and other output from Print Office. However, Web Designer will require a user to understand the complexity of framesets, cascading style sheets, and imported Java Script code, all of which it supports.

(Note: Click on the Reviews link in the left frame of this Web site, for a link to a review of Corel's Word Perfect Office Professional 2000.)

Other Sample Features

Print Office 5

Multimedia tutorials and a wizard-driven interface
Integrated Web window for direct access to Corel's online resources
Add URL's to graphic objects and publish any project to the Web
Extensive import/export capabilities
Compatibility with most word processors on the market
Over 1,000 pre-designed templates
Search engine and Notebook controls
Combine text and photos 
User-friendly interface
Context-sensitive property bar displays tools for use
Linked text frames, and flowing text between frames
Text wrap around objects
Standard, OLE drag-and-drop supported
Multipage projects, tested up to 250 pages
Advance drawing tools
Text merging for labels and mailing
Double-sided printing
Mail merge and import information from Corel Central database
Supports wide variety of file formats

Photo House 2.1

Uses components based on Corel's Photo Paint 7 technology
User friendly interface
Import existing photos from a scanner or camera
Exciting special effects
Drag-and-drop photographic objects and frames
Brush presets
22 Expandable special effects
Support for pressure-sensitive tablets
Painting tools include brush, spray can, clone, eraser, and image sprayer
Touch-up effects include sharpen, brightness/contrast, repair red-eye, de-skew, remove dust and scratches, replace colors, and reduce speckles

Corel Web Designer 2

Supports HTML 1,2,3, table, single image, cascading style sheets

Corel Central 9

Address book and calendar
List book
Reminders
Similar to features built into Word Perfect Office Professional 2000

Primary Competing Programs

Broderbund's Printshop Publishing Suite
Microsoft's Publisher
Mindscape's Print Master Gold and Print Master Platinum
Adobe's Photo Deluxe Business Edition
Design Intelligence's iPublish (will not acquire images from a scanner or camera)

Note: Corel does not plan to bundle Print Office with upcoming versions of Word Perfect Suite, but instead, will offer this program as a complement to their existing office suite.

Recommendations

For home users or small office workers interested in getting into desktop publishing, I always suggest they first start with lower priced applications, such as Corel's excellent Print Office 2000, to allow them to get acquainted with the techniques used in most all desktop publishers, such as page layout, text box creation and text flow, inserting images, inserting pages, using the always numerous additional clipart and photo images, and using the numerous built-in templates. In this regard, Corel's Print Office 2000 can easily be recommended as the product of choice for first-time users of desktop publishing programs.

With computer equipment and software, the old adage, "you get what you pay for" is certainly true. One would expect a desktop publishing or photo image editor program priced over $300 to be something entirely more complex, feature-rich, and more difficult to learn than a product costing less than $100. However, in today's highly competitive world of software, users can expect to see more features in the higher priced products to soon find their way down into less expensive, home-office marketed products.

With Print Office 2000, computer users with no desktop publishing application can be assured this program will meet most all their needs. Others already using another vendor's product, similarly priced, may not be interested in Print Office 2000.

The important thing to remember is to compare desktop publishing programs similarly priced and similarly targeted. Corel's Print Office 2000 can be easily learned, provides numerous templates that will come in handy with its targeted customer base, and is certainly very nicely priced.

Installation and Setup

The setup and install will provide options to select during install, allowing for choice among the many included features. Users are strongly encouraged to NOT load the many available fonts, images, and clipart, as these files will needlessly fill a hard drive and slow down a system.

System Configuration Requirements

Windows 95, 98, NT 4
486 DX 66 minimum, Pentium or equivalent recommended
8 MB RAM for Win 95, 98 (16 MB RAM recommended)
16 MB RAM for NT
2X CD ROM minimum
SVGA (800 X 600) monitor
Mouse or tablet

List Price

$99.00
(No upgrade price)
Street prices may vary, so shop around, especially with online vendors.

Contact

Corel Corporation
Corporate Headquarters
1600 Carling Avenue
Ottawa, Ontario
K1Z 8R7
CANADA
1-800-772-6735
1-613-728-8200
FAX 1-613-761-9176
http://www.corel.com/printoffice
http://www.shop.corel.com

Acknowledgments

Thanks are in order to the many editors of the online versions of PC Magazine, PC World, PC Computing, and Windows Magazine, for their excellent material regarding Corel Print Office 2000 that were of great assistance in the preparation of this review.