Conceptdraw V is a drawing package from CSO, a company whose first product was Macpublisher in 1994. Conceptdraw is part of a family of office solutions, with other applications covering mind-mapping and project management.

It's based on the concept of smart shapes and connectors, which means it's in close competition with Microsoft's Visio. The similarity runs deep, so, for example, in both Visio and Conceptdraw a shape can be displayed and edited in a table view, giving access to all its data and formulae. Many of the actual shapes in Visio and Conceptdraw are uncannily similar, which makes it easy to switch from one to the other.

A key part of Conceptdraw is its template gallery, showing predefined shape libraries for specific types of drawing. There is a generous selection, including flowcharts, network diagrams, electrical engineering, organisation charts, building layouts, maps and website plans. Software developers are provided with numerous UML (Universal Modelling Language), database modelling and user interface libraries. Once you have chosen a library, you can create a document by dragging shapes onto the drawing surface and resizing them with the mouse.

You can also add connecting lines and shapes, which snap to connection points on the other shapes in your drawing. There is support for layers, making it easier to build up complex diagrams or to show and hide different levels of detail. You can also add text annotations, and use backgrounds, borders and title blocks to decorate the diagram. Once completed, you can export a drawing in a wide variety of formats including popular graphics types, HTML, Adobe pdf, Powerpoint and XML. Native Conceptdraw documents can be password-protected.

You can make good use of Conceptdraw without needing custom shapes, but if you do need to go further there is considerable power behind the scenes. Using formulae in a shape table, you can make one property of a shape dependent on others, or on external data. You can also call user-defined routines written in Conceptdraw Basic, similar to Visual Basic. These scripts can also work at the document level, enabling custom applications. For example, you could use Conceptdraw to design a network and have the cost of each component entered as a custom property. This enables you to write a script for the total cost, or draw a chart for the cost breakdown.

Conceptdraw V claims improved interoperability with Microsoft Visio documents. Unfortunately, it is not good enough. The irritating aspect is that both Visio and Conceptdraw can save as XML, but they use different dialects. Conceptdraw can open Visio XML, but there is loss of fidelity. We tried a simple example and found shapes collapsing to lines when converted. Going the other way is even more difficult. There is no Visio export option, but the vendors run an automated web-based service, or you can download a converter that requires Visio to be installed on the same machine as Conceptdraw.

Your attitude to Conceptdraw will depend largely on whether the ability to run on a Mac is important. If it is, Conceptdraw is a terrific package and easy to recommend. If not, then Visio may be a better choice.

There are a few things that Conceptdraw does better, such as the Paste in place command that lets you copy a shape from one page to exactly the same position on another page. You can do this in Visio, but it is complex operation.

On the other hand, Visio is more powerful, packs in more features and has extra polish. We missed Visio's Pan and Zoom tool, which lets you easily navigate a large document. For web deployment, Conceptdraw can export to a Macromedia Flash movie, whereas Visio has SVG (Scaleable Vector Graphics), an official web standard but less widely supported than Flash.

For the full range of libraries, Basic scripting and the ability to set custom properties, you need the Professional Edition, as the Standard Edition only has sufficient libraries for typical office diagramming. Overall, this is a great package for Windows refugees who need a Mac equivalent to Visio, or for mixed environments. Pure Windows users may prefer the Microsoft product, but there is a free trial download for Conceptdraw so try them both if you can.

Contact: Computer Systems Odessa
www.conceptdraw.com

System requirements:

• Windows 98/NT4 or higher
• Pentium 166MHz or higher with 128MB of Ram
• Mac OSX 10.1.5 or higher
• G3 or higher with 128MB of Ram

Price details:
RRP Pro edition (download) £194.58 (£165.60 ex VAT)
Standard edition (download) £83.07 (£70.70 ex VAT)