The boring old marketing presentation has come a long way.
Travelling sellers no longer need struggle inarticulately without graphic tools. Of course, they can still struggle inarticulately withgraphic tools, but computer graphics that explain things better have been around some time.
Colour slides, overheads and videos are an essential part of the sales presentation. Not only in sales. Executives of all sorts are coming to rely on graphics to cliche their message across.
Corporate-structure diagrams, sales targets, production schedules, performance indicators and quality-assurance plans are finding their way on to slides and overheads to explain to middle management, clients and customers why they are being downsized, outsized, growthed, negatively growthed or projected into a dynamic new phase.
Many graphics programs are the preserve of graphic artists and computer buffs because they are hard to use.
Someone, however, has watched many of these sales presentations and the graphics behind them, and seen the need to produce a computer program that will generate them easily.
That someone has now come up with a program that even the most moronic, IT-illiterate executive can use.
The program is SnapGrafx and someone has bothered to register that ugly, neologistic spelling as a trademark. (Don’t they have any taste or sense of language in the Trade Marks office?)
SnapGrafx does precisely nothing that a dozen desktop publishing programs do not already do. But it does is more easily; far more easily. And far more cheaply.
Basically, the program enables the user to produce organisational charts, time charts, venn diagrams, pyramid, spoke and target charts and so on. The elements to the graphics can be virtually any symmetrical shape, joined by any variety of straight or curved lines of varying thickness with or without arrowheads. All the elements can be shaded, filled or made three-dimensional. Type (using any of the Windows True Type fonts) can be added virtually anywhere. You can also snap clipart shapes (little cars or humans) to replace the boxes, circles or pyramids.
The main drawcard for SnapGrafx, however, is not what it does, but the ease with which is does it.
The program is almost totally icon driven, unlike most Windows programs which rely more on pull-down menus. SnapGrafx has a mouse feature unlike most other Windows programs. As the mouse glides over an icon a description of what it does appears at the bottom of the screen. In most other programs you have to click on the icon before the description appears (with the danger you will accidentally execute).
In SnapGrafx, the user can glide around the many options seeing the descriptions instantaneously without clicking and moving the mouse to a neutral zone before unclicking.
That makes SnapGrafx a delight for first-time non-teenage users.
But simplicity of use has drawbacks. SnapGrafx does not have the fancy borders, drawing tools or type-twisting tools like CorelDraw or Microsoft Publisher, for example.
However, SnapGrafx is not a program for graphic artists, but for mangers who want to add charts to their documents (by cutting and pasting into, say, Word or WordPerfect) or to make charts for overheads or slides.
SnapGrafx devotes a lot to helping the user with quick-tour tutorials and on-line help. Many programs are doing this because it makes good marketing sense. About 1.5 megs of SnapGrafx’s 3.5 megs is help or tutorial. Microsoft Publisher is similar with 4.2 megs of its 7.5 devoted to help, cue cards and samplers.
More programmers are realising that ühowa program does something is just as important as üwhat it does.
Program vendors are seeking wider markets than the computer literate or the computer junkies; that market is already snared.
SnapGrafx’s appeal to the executive market through ease of use is quite smart. As more executives use computers they rely less on assistants and others to prepare documents with the resultant problem of security. This was especially true in the graphics area which was often beyond the trusted assistant.
Now executives can play their organisational power games and marketing strategies on the screen in secrecy.
SnapGrafx is available from Micrografx Australia PO Box 5634 Chatswood West NSW 2057 and costs $145.
If you want a graphics program for business use without the fancy design attributes and high price of more complex programs, SnapGrafx has the price advantage. Microsoft Publisher is between $239 and $299, depending on where you buy it, and CorelDraw 3.0 is $299 if upgrading from any other drawing program. CorelDraw 4.0 (the RollsRoyce of Windows graphics programs) has a Rolls Royce price tag of around $800.