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Corel Print House 
by Lou Harris, Alamo PC

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Corel Print House is a new graphics program that is relatively easy to use and has a number of powerful features. It has templates for greeting cards, letterhead, calendars, several different kinds of business forms and certificates, stationery, business cards, mailing labels and even post cards. A handy feature is the built- in spell checker. There are wizards for each kind of project. The drawing and editing tools allow for even greater creativity. The $19.95 price tag makes it an incredible value -- worth it for the clipart images alone -- not to mention the fun, creative and functional projects you can create.

To use Print House, you must have the following:

The size of the manual might mislead you. There are only 5 pages of instruction -- just barely enough to get started. The remainder is a catalogue of images and fonts. The online help menu works like any other you might have used. The program is not as intuitive as many other Windows programs but with a little educated guessing, you can create your first project fairly quickly. To include most things in your document, you just drag and drop your selections.

 The program comes with over 5,000 editable clipart images, 1,000 photos, over 100 fonts and more than 900 professionally designed sample templates. Most of the clipart is in color and they print beautifully in color or in black and white. There are over 500 templates designed to work with Paper Direct products. The output is great using either a laser or inkjet printer. The manual contains small (but large enough to see without a magnifying glass) pictures of the clipart, photos, etc. and examples of the fonts. The clipart and photos are divided into functional sections which correspond to the selections on the drop down menu. The font samples show you the alphabet and numbers. There is a section of line drawn images called “Color Me” which are great for children’s place mats, coloring books, etc. The flags and maps are great educational tools. You can also import graphics with bmp, wpg, tif and pcx extensions.

The last 49 pages of the manual are a catalogue of phrases to use in your greeting cards. The categories are the standard anniversary, birthday, sympathy, etc. but included also is a section on support, friendship, thinking of you and Jewish holidays.

 In the example shown, the flowers around the edge are single flowers in the flower clipart. Using the sizing, move to front/back and rotating functions, I created the bouquet and tied it with the bow clipart image.

 List price, $39.00; Street price, $19.95. PrintHouse, Corel Corporation, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. 613-728- 3733, FAX 613-761-9176

 Lou Harris conducts a desktop publishing business from her home. She volunteers on the Alamo PC Help Line to aid those learing MS Publisher. She can be reached via bob__Harris@msn.com.