For the nonartists among us - Broderbund's The Print Shop Deluxe for Windows 1.2 desktop publishing software - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, April, 1993 by Daniel Grotta

The Print Shop Deluxe

Rating: *** 1/2

For Windows

AT A GLANCE: Lightweight Windows-based, desktop-publishing program for producing stylish office and personal signs, letterheads, banners, greeting cards, and more.

DOCUMENTATION: Excellent; manual is to-the-point and profusely illustrated.

EASE OF USE: Simple, virtually foolproof, but relatively limited in function. Fun to use.

SUPPORT: Good tutorial and online help; free, but a toll call to technical support.

VERSION REVIEWED: 1.2

LIST PRICE: $80

STREET PRICE: $53

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: 2MB 386 PC or higher; hard-disk drive; mouse; VGA, SVGA; DOS 3.1 and Windows 3.1 or higher

PUBLISHER: Broderbund, 500 Redwood Blvd., Novato, CA 94948; (415) 382-4400, (800) 521-6263

For most users, high-powered desktop publishing programs like Quark Xpress and even Express Publisher make as much sense as driving an 18-wheel semi to the comer market. After all, heavy-duty DTP programs are capable of producing a 300-page book or a Madison Avenue advertising layout. In contrast, The Print Shop Deluxe is specifically designed to allow nonartists to create simple but stylish letterheads, invitations, customized wall calendars, decorative banners, personalized greeting cards, and the like.

Print Shop Deluxe is a remarkably easy, fun-to-use program. There's an extensive tutorial, excellent online help, and one of the clearest manuals I've ever encountered. In fact, the program is so intuitive that most people will get the hang of things in minutes.

To operate the program, you simply select your project---calendar, stationery, greeting card, or, for example, choose a background (from a rather extensive and colorful library, including everything from pumpkins to balloons), pick the layout, and start designing. You can add type--and customize it with special effects, such as shadowing or rotating the letters--and combine graphics images.

If you can't find a particular design element in Print Shop Deluxe's large library, the program can import files saved in the Windows .BMP format. And because the program uses scalable type, there's no quality loss when you enlarge or reduce your creation to fit the printed page. While your creations will print out reasonably well on black-and-white laser and dot-matrix printers, they truly spring to life when outputted to a color printer. And while some graphics programs seem to take forever for screen redraws or file saves, Print Shop Deluxe is remarkably fast, even on my relatively slow 386SX machine.

Within one hour after I installed the program, I had generated several new letterheads and the first draft of a party invitation. The results were so attractive and professional looking that I'll probably take the color printouts to my local print shop to produce them in quantity.