Installing the program took about twenty minutes, including the restart. The included Install CD was easy to use, mostly running itself; however, about halfway through, the wizard informed me that I needed to reset my display for small font sizes. I had to back out and start over, wasting another twenty minutes. A warning at the beginning or in printed instructions would have been nice.

A choice of installations is offered. A full version takes 1295 MB, but still requires the use of the Program CD; a “typical” version takes 815 MB, but requires running of the Program CD and the occasional swapping of the four (!) Art CDs; and a “minimum” version uses 687 MB, also requiring the Program and Art CDs as well. An enclosed coupon advertises a DVD version for an additional $9.95 with “No More Disk Swapping!” If I had a DVD on my computer, I would spring for it just to save the time and hassle. I chose the typical version.

Once installed and opened, PrintShop v. 12 offers a menu of options, including Business, Home and Community, All Projects (combining these two), My Projects (where saved projects are stored for easy access later), and Design Center (the help desk site for tutorials, help files, and a link to online help resources). Additional buttons give access to an Advanced Project Search, a wizard to create a stationery set integrated with the theme and design of your created project, a built-in Calendar Creator program, and a link to Brøderbund online.

Choosing All Projects gives the user access to a blank page or twenty-four sets of project types, including banners, booklets, brochures, business cards, calendars, envelopes, fax covers, forms, greeting cards, labels, presentations, resumes, transfers, web pages, and more. Each project then offers themes for business, education, events, occasions, and sports. Selecting a theme provides a chance to personalize a QuickStart Layout or start from scratch. 

The QuickStart option presents a multitude of pre-prepared layouts (Brøderbund claims 13,000+ layouts and 235,000+ images), complete with themes, fonts, colors, and graphics. They are very easy to use as is, but they tend to be mostly informal in nature with cartoon-like art work and fonts. Starting from scratch, on the contrary, is not so easy to do. 

This new version of PrintShop provides the user a much larger variety of options than the old DOS version, but in many ways less control of these options. Changing fonts, colors, and backgrounds or adding features like text boxes is slow and not intuitive. The complexity of this massive program makes the learning curve very steep. For example, creating a calendar with a headline, events for several days, and a couple of text boxes took twice as long as the older version, and some elements were simply abandoned as not being worth the time to accomplish. When printed, the colors were not true to the print preview and not consistent from one text box to the next. Color density of the background was extremely limited with only a few preprogrammed choices.

If a beginning user merely wants to produce a simple Web page using the QuickStart layouts, that is easy enough to do, but venturing into Start-from-Scratch country is a frustrating experience. Converting a Word document to HTML, using FrontPage, or even creating a page in Netscape is easier, quicker, more intuitive, and gives more control over the options.

The user wanting an integrated publishing program with the same set of tools with the same look and feel for all the applications and that allows her or him to do a little of everything, and those willing and able to spend the time to learn to use it, will find PrintShop Deluxe fun and rewarding, especially for family and home use. The user needing a business-like appearance and close control of custom features may want to explore other software options. 

Would I buy it? If my new Dell computer running Windows XP would run the old DOS version, or printer drivers were available for it for my HP Office Jet, I think I would stick with the old version. It does less, but what it does, it does easily and quickly. The new version does much more, but at a cost in time, effort, and complexity that gives me pause. Bigger is not necessarily better.