15-Minute Reviews :: ConceptDraw VI Standard v6.2

Greetings and welcome to another edition of 15-Minute Reviews! Today’s application is ConceptDraw VI Standard version 6.2 by Computer Systems Odessa – An application similar to Visio in that it is designed for flowcharting, diagramming and illustrating common scenarios.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“ConceptDraw VI is designed for professional flowcharting, diagramming and illustrating. Its flexible, handy drawing tools help business and technical users quickly document complex structures, systems and processes.

ConceptDraw VI charts can be shared as a variety of graphics files, MS Visio XML files and MS PowerPoint presentations. Owing to the advanced libraries of pre-drawn shapes, ConceptDraw VI is perfect for most of the charting tasks. Requiring little skills and efforts to create high-quality graphics the software will become your efficient assistant.”

Quick Pros

• Plenty of templates to use, all with a nice collection of iconsets on each
• Export format list extensive
• Great set of tools for building your own icons or setting up the layout
• Layers functionality very handy for managing groups
• Drag and drop support of image, text and other files
• Create your own icons and add them to the groups

Quick Cons

• No advanced functionality such as using datagrams to build SQL statements (only in Professional version)
• ConceptDraw Basic only available in Professional
• Really should have started the Floating Dialogs on the bottom; Hard to manage on right
• Did manage to make application crash by dragging Floating Dialog over itself
• Some lacking features that Professional

Expansion

This application attempts to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft Visio for the market of diagramming and flowcharting. This is a hard market, but one that does need a few more options as usable alternatives to what is currently out there.

I found that there was a decent selection of templates, each of which come bundled with their own set of icons – There is overlap, but I’m happy for some overlap for uniformity between different applications just for ease of finding which you want quickly by visual recognition. The export list is also really good; Flash, graphics, HTML, PDF and much more, enough to satisfy mosts’ needs.

The toolset is great, and stands out with some of the more uncommon tools set up on their own; The arc and spline for example, help you design a ‘softer’ look to your designs, especially for more graphical presentation as opposed to production management. The rotate shapes tool is also good for easing the process of rotation.

There is a bunch of functionality which is nice to have; Layers control to help manage groupings of data; Drag and drop support of images, text files and more; It is also nice being able to create your icons as easily as drag-and-drop over the category you wish to have them filed in.

A few minor irritations I did have was that the Floating Dialogs sit on the side when you start for the first time; This is hard to manage concidering the number of tabs involved with the Floating Dialogs (Nine total.) When trying to rearrange these, they tend to get lost or stuck to side of the current grouping of Floating Dialogs that hides them, and ends you up with having to go along and ‘stretch’ the box around to find which one you just lost. Not a very intuitive system for managing them. Also, when I was moving one of the dialogs around, I accidentally released over itself twice in a row, and on the second time, it crashed the whole application.

A note though to comment; While Standard version is available to Giveaway of the Day visitors today, it is no longer available on their website, only their more-expensive Professional version. While it is more expensive, you get a conciderable number of other templates, including the ones that possess wizards; You also get the ones with database connectivity as well as site spidering; On top of that, you get access to ConceptDraw Basic, a scripting language.

Final Verdict

There is a lot great with this application; I find it easier to use in many ways that Visio and more productive as well. While scaled back from the Professional version (Lacking wizards, some templates, database connectivity and the scripting language,) this application provides more than enough for most people’s diagramming needs. If you feel you will have the need for this application, I would recommend picking it up now while it is free. While $149.99 is a good price as well for what you get compared to Visio, keep in mind that Computer Systems Odessa no longer offers Standard on their site for sale, only Professional which is $299.99 (Which is still a better deal than Visio.)

A note to those who are reading this review from Giveaway of the Day – Even though the pages linked by them do state there are wizards and database connectivity, there is unfortunately none in this version, only Professional version. I assume that because Standard is no longer available and they no longer have a product page for that, the publisher wanted used those links instead.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, May 11, 2007