Business graphics and beyond - Software Review - Claris' Claris Impact for Macintosh - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1994 by Charles H. Gajeway

Rating: ***

Claris Impact for Macintosh

Version Reviewed: 1.0

List Price: $149 ($99 competitive upgrade)

Average Street Price: $100

Publisher: Claris, (408) 727-8227, (800) 355-2747

MAC

Claris describes Impact as an integrated, eight-in-one business graphics application. In plain English, that means it mixes in a little of everything, from drawing and charting to presentation capabilities and word processing. You get an array of automated charts (data charts, calendars, organization charts, tables, flowcharts, network diagrams, outlines, and timeline charts); these are integrated with drawing tools and basic word processing features that make it easy to produce your presentations or reports.

A typical Claris product, Impact combines features designed for maximum utility, a streamlined and logical interface, and a style of operation that is deliberately consistent with other Claris programs. MacWrite, MacDraw, FileMaker, and ClarisWorks fans will feel right at home. The program also incorporates a brief but well-designed tutorial that new Claris users can work through to bring them up to speed quickly and painlessly.

Claris aims to free you from having to use a bunch of different applications (such as a separate draw program to add color fills to a chart) to get a unified result: You can produce three different types of documents in this one program: reports that combine text and graphic elements, presentations complete with slides and video clips, and drawings. Although document types are separate and distinct, their contents are easily transferred, especially via library files that store commonly used graphic items and make them available from a floating menu. We found that the word processing module, although lacking in such advanced features as sectioning and style sheets that are useful for creating long or highly formatted documents, does offer useful report-building tools, including outlining, flowcharts, and tables. The drawing module is more than adequate for everyday business use, though artists accustomed to advanced drawing, illustration, or presentation programs would certainly find limitations.

For creating text and graphics, helpful color and pattern pop-up menus are available at the top of the screen. Drawing tools are concentrated in pop-up menus that can be left open and moved anywhere on the screen for your convenience. We liked the Smart Shapes palette and the Claris bezigon tool, which we found to be one of the fastest and most flexible curve drawing tools around. Another handy feature is the ability to create linked text boxes, giving you a great deal of flexibility in designing pages in a report, for example.

Where Impact really stands out is in creating charts. Most programs make you plod through several stages of data input and menu choices--Impact allowed us to bypass these tedious steps by letting us simply select the appropriate chart model from the toolbar and then click where we wanted the chart to go. We were then presented with a tabbed dialog box that let us specify how we wanted the elements of the chart to appear (such as the type of chart, the number of rows and columns for data series, color assignments, placement and appearance of titles, legends, labels, and so on), and then were given the opportunity to enter or import the appropriate data.

One of the hardest parts of creating reports and presentations is maintaining a truly consistent appearance. Keeping backgrounds, colors, fonts, and layouts looking identical from page to page and slide to slide can be frustrating and difficult. Impact made this easy by letting us create and save named styles for our commonly used chart and slide formats. Several very attractive styles are provided with the program, and we used them as they were; we were also able to modify them to create our own family of styles to suit our needs.

A rather surprising omission in Impact's impressive lineup of functions was the ability to import data directly from MacWrite Pro, FileMaker Pro, or Resolve. To use files produced with these popular programs, you must first open the parent program and save them in another format; then you have to get back into Impact, which is--at the very least--annoying. Additionally, Impact can read only Excel 3.0 files, two generations behind the current release.

If you are using color, you will need around 3MB of free RAM, not giving Impact very much breathing room on a 4MB-equipped Mac or Performa. In addition, the program would occasionally quit without warning in low-memory conditions, making frequent saves mandatory.

Impact, however, is easy to use, flexible, and fast. Organization charts and flowcharts, normally nasty jobs, are a breeze with Impact, and we found its timeline charts a simple but valuable project management tool. If your everyday tasks involve creating a lot of reports and presentations, you may well find that Impact is worth getting to know.

Upside-Down Marketing

By George R. Walther ($20, 209 pp., hardcover). McGraw-Hill, (800) 262-4729.