Print Shop Pro 2.0

If you're looking to create your own family newsletter, a holiday greeting card, or professional-looking marketing material for your small business, Print Shop Pro 2.0 ($89.99 direct) is right up your alley. Print Shop has been a popular top desktop publishing tool for the past 25 years, and the Broderbund has finally released version 2.0. It's aimed at users who have desktop publishing needs but not the expertise or money to use more higher-end publishing tools like Quark or ($700 street, ). Print Shop is simple enough for crafty home users, yet powerful enough for small business users who want to publish their own direct mailers, business cards, or letterhead. While I love how Print Shop makes it quick and easy to create projects by simply tweaking one of the thousands of ready-made templates to your needs, you'll run into issues if you're going to do more than just a little tweaking.

The beauty of Print Shop is how quick and painless it is. For instance, to create a family Christmas card, choose a Christmas-card template from the Project Gallery, switch the stock image with a family photo, type in your own message, print it out, and you're done—in under 10 minutes. If you're looking to produce a brochure promoting your business, choose a template from the Project Gallery, swap out the stock images with images of your own (or images from Print Shop's Image Gallery), fill in the text boxes with your own copy, tweak the colors as you see fit, and you're done.

Print Shop Pro is fairly easy to use, since most of what you do is drag-and-drop to swap elements into your ready-made template. The six tabs to the left of the screen gives you access to properties such as text boxes, shapes, layout, and paper size. The two bottom tabs give you access to Print Shop's massive Project Gallery and Image Gallery. You can filter each gallery to specify what you're looking for, but the templates and images are stored in the Print Shop cloud so you'll have to be connected to the Internet to use them.

Print Shop has added some advanced features to version 2.0, such as layers, which come in handy when you're trying to organize different elements of your project. The image tray at the bottom of the window gives you quick access to commonly used images, such as company logos. You can now also use drop shadows, gradients, and blur effects to spruce up your project. Clicking Launch Ideas.Project.com on the home screen takes you to ideas.project.com, where you can find video tutorials and ideas that can help you get the most out of the software.

($149.99-$679.99 list, ) offers similar easy template-based functionality, but it's not nearly as robust. Word's templates are mostly clip art and its library of templates and images don't come close to the variety offered by Print Shop Pro. Print Shop Pro's interface is also more intuitive and easier to use. It puts everything you need right in front of you with simple tabs and trays, while Word forces you to do a lot more navigation, and considerably more drilling down through menus. —

Going Beyond the Templates
Print Shop 2.0 is great if you just want to pick a template and tweak a few elements. However, I ran into trouble when I wanted to do more customization. While adding images to a brochure template, I couldn't find a surefire way to precisely align images and other objects. If I say wanted to add and center an image in the third column of a brochure, I just had to eyeball it as best I could. Selecting the column and image then selecting Align > Horizontal Align Center worked sometimes, but half the time it knocked the image and entire column out of line. In fact, if I accidentally shifted an image or text box out of place in the template, I couldn't shift it exactly back into place except by manually redoing it with my mouse. You can drop horizontal and vertical guidelines by clicking the ruler at the top or left of the interface to help you snap elements into place. However, there's no way to move the guides around, add multiple guides evenly, or clear them all at once.

Word's image alignment is somewhat better, offering gridlines and locking certain elements in place. It also lets you swap images easier than Print Shop does. When you highlight an image in Word then inserting another image, Word automatically resizes and replaces the image so it fits in exactly where the old image was. Adding at image in Print Shop simple drops the image in the middle of the page and you have to use your mouse to move it into place and resize it by hand.

If you're building something from scratch using a blank page, there is no a simple way to setup a structured layout where you can make sure all your images and text boxes are aligned and perfectly spaced out. While Print Shop gives you many Ready Made layouts to work from and most Print Shop users aren't looking to get their hands too dirty with the layouts, simple things like having to resize and align images and other elements freehand can be annoying. If your goal is to create projects from scratch, you'd be better off with a higher-powered desktop publishing program.

Once your design is complete, it's time to print. You can preview what you've been working on and print out a test alignment page to adjust your printout specifically for your printer. You can set up duplex printing and setup larger projects that print out on more than one page. For instance, if you were printing a large poster but only have a printer capable of 8.5" × 11", Print Shop will print it out multiple pages you can then piece together. Print Shop's mail merge feature helps when you want to printout personalized mailings such as envelopes with different addresses or invitations to different people. Mail merge lets you create many copies of one project with placeholders for the information unique to each copy. You can find the same functionality in Word, but Word has the advantage of pulling contacts directly from your Outlook rather than having to import contact list.

Print Shop's Smilebox
Included with Print Shop is a small eGreeting designer called SmileBox that you can launch from the home screen. SmileBox is a fun little app that lets you create your own digital greetings, cards, invitations, and more equipped with animations and music. Using SmileBox is as easy and intuitive to use as Print Shop. Simply drag-and-drop photos into your eGreeting and select the text boxes to type your personalized messages. Each greeting you create comes with a choice of appropriately themed tunes. For example, you'll have a selection of Christmas songs if you choose a Christmas template or Irish songs if you're making a St. Patrick's card. You can even add your own music, but you'll have to pay $2.99 for a Premium SmileBox account for the privilege. When you're done you can email it, embed it to your Facebook, burn it to a DVD (if you paid for a premium account), or print it out.

Print Shop 2.0 gives you all the tools and handholding you need to publish quality creations in minutes, with only a few modifications on your part. Its Project Gallery and Image Gallery provide a huge variety of art and layouts from which to choose. The app doesn't exactly lend itself to heavy-duty customization or building projects up from scratch. But for the vast majority of potential users, who are just looking to produce impressive, hassle-free projects, Print Shop Pro 2.0 is a great fit, and will produce much more eye-catching print projects than what you can do on Word. If the $90 price tag is too high, note that Print Shop also come in cheaper Basic ($29.99 direct) and Deluxe ($49.99 direct) versions that have fewer features.

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