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Mac OS X  |  Design / Graphics  |  Other Design / Graphics  |  The Print Shop  |  Poor flexibility with iCal integration

The Print Shop

The Print Shop

Print labels, greeting cards, posters, calendars...

Version:  2.0.7.1

   [ Views: 392 ]

Poor flexibility with iCal integration

Feedback Type:  Review

Contributed by: clandiva Wednesday, September 24 2008 @ 11:22 PM PDT

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: Less than a month

Recommend Product: NO

I bought this program specifically because it is one of few (paper) publishing programs that integrate with iCal. I am not at all pleased with it. I found the result to be unusable.

When testing functionality in a monthly calendar, the events ported over allright, but each day's events are a single block of text in the following format: "(start time - end time) - Event Name", "(start time - end time) - Event Name", "(start time - end time) - Event Name"... There doesn't seem to be a way to search and replace so that I can quickly change the commas to line breaks, or get rid of the unwanted end time.

I CAN edit the text for each day, but I have to edit day by day. There is no way to batch process your changes. For my needs, this is no improvement over the time-intensive and repetitive process of creating each month in Word.

Further, the block of event text, once line breaks are manually is inserted, have wide line leading and I don't see any way to change that either.

Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to regulate the number of rows for the monthly calendar. The template uses 6 rows no matter what. It doesn't matter whether I make the event text large or small: I can't seem to resize the row height or cell size in any way. The row does not expand to incorporate a long list of events: those days are just truncated without any indicator that there is any text missing.

There IS a lot of incorporated clip art, but much of it is unsophisticated and cartoonish. The "professionally designed" templates seem coarse and uninspired. I'm not terribly impressed.

That being said, my interest in the software has been along fairly narrow featureset lines. I already use other layout software that I prefer even just visually... So there may be layout features that others may find useful.

Also, though I I found the template implementation rigid and constraining, other users may find it helpful and comforting.   
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2 of 4 users found this helpful.

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Comments

1 comments |

Poor flexibility with iCal integration - hschulsinger

I have been using The Print Shop for many years and it meets all my needs. Of course, I never expected it to be a Quark Express or InDesign, but for designing and printing greeting cards, envelopes, posters, etc, it does an excellent job. I don't use it to create calendars, so its lack of integration with iCal doesn't particularly bother me, although I can understand your concern. But that's just one aspect of what the program does. Perhaps those users that are complaining about The Print Shop's poor page layout capabilities need to put out the big bucks for full-featured, comprehensive page layout software. For sixty bucks, MacKiev gives you quite a bit for your money, and certainly a lot more than when the program was in the inept hands of Broderbund.

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Saturday, August 29 2009 @ 07:38 AM PDT