Customizing Your Workspace Can Boost Productivity in CorelDRAW

In the last few days I've run across a couple of situations that showed off the power of workspaces in CorelDRAW and Corel PHOTO-PAINT. The first was a CorelDRAW user who didn't understand the power of customization and the other was in regards to Adobe Photoshop not having such a powerful feature.

Yesterday brought the latest Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. It is the show where Apple makes their big announcements about new products. One of their flashiest announcements was the Retina display on the new MacBook Pro. It features a resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels on a 15" diagonal screen. As part of the announcement was information on an updated version of Adobe Photoshop to work on the new display. While they may have said why this new version of Photoshop was necessary, I didn't see it mentioned in any of the press coverage. Most likely it is a version that includes larger buttons as the normal ones would be impossible to see on the new display. This gave me a chuckle since one of the things I always do with customization in CorelDRAW and Corel PHOTO-PAINT are to increase the size of icons to the Large size instead of the default Small size. No special version would be necessary unless it defaulted to a difference workspace.

Then there was a message from a user who had two workspaces, neither of which he had customized. One was created when he installed cutting software to integrate with CorelDRAW and it included a button to launch the cutting software. Yet when the default workspace was selected, the button wasn't there. The user liked parts of both and I suggested customizing a new workspace to use all of the desired elements.

If you aren't familiar with customization of a workspace, it is a topic I discuss in Lesson 45 of CorelDRAW X5 Unleashed. For those who already have a copy, you might want to look it over again. And if you don't have a copy, this is yet one more reason you should have this training resource in your arsenal.

I also want to remind users of CorelDRAW X3 and earlier that the grace period for CorelDRAW upgrades expires in six more days. If you wait until after this date, you must buy the full version of CorelDRAW. Get your upgrade now before you have to pay full price!