Need a handout for your next meeting? Need a large scale printed visual for your next project? SmartDraw can help you out! SmartDraw has a variety of printing options that will fit any of the desired outputs you might need. Plus, SmartDraw shows you exactly what you will be printing with the Print Preview. This allows you see exactly what will be coming out of the printer. SmartDraw has a single, unlimited work area that automatically expands to accommodate your drawing. Most visuals have "Print to One Page" as a default. This means SmartDraw will proportionally shrink your drawing down to the actual page size you are printing to, no matter how large the drawing is in SmartDraw. This is why the Print Preview can be very helpful.

To access the Print Preview, seleft the "File" tab located at the top left of your SmartDraw window and select the "Print" option. The Print Preview window will be displayed to the right of the Print menu options.

While working on your visual in SmartDraw, when the "Print to One Page" command is selected the page margins will not appear on the work area. If you would like to see the page margin lines on the work area, select "Print to Actual Size" instead of "Print to One Page" in the Print menu. The page margin lines should then be visible on the work area if it is larger than a single page. If you wish to have a multi-page document, where each diagram fits within its own page, you can manually position your visual within the boundaries of each page on the work area.

You can also control how large your work area should be by number of pages. To do this, go to the Page tab and choose "Work Area" to define how many pages across and down you want the work area to be.

Printing Custom Page Sizes

So, how about the printing options for a size larger than your average printer? Many of our customers need to print visuals that are much too large to print in office. This is where our PDF Export options comes in handy!

First, navigate to the Page tab, then click the Margins menu, and select Custom Margins.

A dialog window will pop up. Here, you will want to choose the printer to be SmartDraw PDF Export. Also, we recommend checking "Use the minimum margins for this printer"

To set your custom page size, click on the Properties button next to the Printer selection. Here you can enter in the width and height you want your visual to be. Just make sure you define a size that your printer service (FedEx, etc) can handle. Here is a list of commonly used paper sizes for your reference.

Once you are done configuring your settings, click OK all the way out of the windows and you will see the page margin lines disappear as the page size resets itself. Now, click the Export to PDF button at the top of the SmartDraw window. Once it is exported, be sure to open the file and check that everything looks okay.

If you have any other questions about this, feel free to comment below or email us!

When you hold meetings, do you actually feel like you are getting things done? Here are some common signs that you need to revamp the way you run your meetings (plus some hints on how to better manage your meetings). But, productive meetings really comes down to these three simple tips.

1. Define the Desired Outcome

Before every meeting (and before you even declare the meeting) you should explicitly state the purpose of the meeting. You should have the answer to the question, "What is supposed to change or happen at the end of the meeting?" When you call a meeting, the meeting should be to change, develop, stop, or start something. There should also be a clear plan at the end of a meeting.

When you have a project meeting, you will typically discuss the criteria for success, those involved, the sequence of activities, and the action items after the meeting. This is where the next step comes into play.

2. Limit Topics of Discussion

A common rule for presentations is that the presenter should limit the number of points to make during a presentation. The same concept applies to meetings. Tightening up the topic list for your meeting, will also shorten the time needed for the meeting and increase the potential for action items being defined at the end of the meeting.

If there is not a clear plan of action or a clearly defined desired outcome, do not meet. In order to define all the topics to be discussed, you can use a mind map to define the agenda.

3. Wrap Up with Action Items

When you have a clearly defined desired outcome and you limit the topics of discussion, it is easy to wrap up the meeting with action items. At the end of the meeting, you should review the decisions and changes made to remind those of their accountability and time frame. SmartDraw's Assignment View in the Meeting Template will allow you clearly show who is assigned what task. This can be updated and adjusted in real time.

As the project progresses, you can also easily see which tasks are running late and which are complete by setting the task completion.

As a rule, meetings should be reserved for action and they should not be the regular form of commuinication! If you have not already, download a trial of SmartDraw today and check out the meeting template.

Are you continually struggling to complete projects on time? A well designed and well executed project takes some forethought. By following these four steps, you can execute a successful project everytime!

Step 1: Break apart the big tasks

One of the key reasons many projects are delivered late is that the tasks assigned to team members are too broad or vague. The first step in accurately estimating the time to project completion is breaking down the project specifications into tasks that can be easily quantified.

A good example of a broad task is "design a new email campaign to sell a new product offering to existing customers." Without digging into the specifics of what's involved, it is impossible to provide a truly sufficient answer. That's where the trouble begins with most projects: the project manager doesn't break his or her project into small enough components, which causes the guessing game to begin. The solution is to split these broad tasks into a number of smaller, more specific subtasks. Tasks should be broken down to the level of granularity that will allow the project planner to make the most accurate estimate for time to completion.

Step 2: Schedule with precision

Precision scheduling is only achievable after the breakdown of tasks in Step 1. In this step, we want to avoid using assumptions and guesswork. We are after facts and data.

Begin by making sure each subtask can be completed in two days or less. This will allow a much more accurate estimate of timeing and resources that each subtask will require. Dependent tasks will also be identified in this stage, so that inadvertent overlap of scheduling can be avoided.

Since we want facts, not guesses, it is important to get timing estimates from team members who will actually be completing the tasks. Of course, when you are asking your team for estimates, it is important to ask for estimates of the specific subtasks, rather than broadly defined tasks. It is easier to quantify specific tasks and then estimate how long the collection of tasks will take.

Step 3: Establish accountability with real-time information capture

Even if a project planner can define specific tasks, this may not be enough to sufficiently communicate to the rest of the team. This is where the importance of project meetingings come into play. Obtaining and sharing information at this state is vital.

The secret to effective project meetings is to capture the decisions and action items in real time. This can be done using a common document in which each person can see the changes as they are made. Typically, people attending project planning meetings take their own private notes. But often the notes of even two people in the meeting do not match the other's. Thus, they leave the meeting with different ideas of the action items and what needs to be done.

Live information capture and assignment views of mind maps allow the project planner to easily delegate all the tasks in one document for everyone to see. Doing this live and in one visual results in clear communication, reduces the amount of confusion, and creates accountability among your team.

Step 4: Measure your project's progress

The key to reaching the completion on time and under budget is accurately measuring the progress being made. Accurate progress measurement is one of the weakest areas for most project managers. How many times have you been in a meeting where someone was asked, "how far along are you with your project?" and the answer was, "Oh, uhhh, I'd say 50% or 60% done." Answers like these are not definitive and completely unhelpful!

Relying on broad estimates rather than definitive answers lead to projects that are behind schedule. The cure is defining milestones. A milestone is a well-defined, solid achievement that is met at some point through the course of a project. The word originates from the placeholders used to indicate how far travelers had progressed along Roman roads; every time travelers passed a milestone, they knew that they were that much closer to reaching their destination. This analogy accurately described what project managers try to do: they want to define clear indicators that show how close the team is to reaching their project's goals.

SmartDraw as a Solution

Managing a large project can be intimidating, especially one that spans several months and involves multiple departments. However, when you use the right software, project planning becomes simple. With SmartDraw you can easily break the big tasks and accurately estimate the time for completion using a mind map.

Then, with a click of a button, project planners can view the mind map in an assignment view where tasks can be easily assigned.

With a final click of a button, the assignment view can be turned into a project chart. In this form, you can easily update and make adjustments to tasks as the project progresses.

Additionally, because SmartDraw integrates with Outlook and SharePoint, there is no reason anyone will be out of the loop! You can email any view of the project in a variety of formats that anyone can view.

With SmartDraw, you will have real-time, 24/7 built-in accountability! If you haven't already, be sure to download a trial of SmartDraw today.

There is no excuse for a dull presentation - even in the business environment. In fact, presentations in the workplace may be the most important to you! Your own success in the workplace depends on your ability to clearly explain your ideas. The central goal of any presentation is to communicate and effective communication is achieved when ideas are shaped simply, concisely, and interestingly.

When you are asked to present a new strategy, training materials, or any new idea you may have, you should bear these principles in mind:

Principle 1: Less is more. Excessive visuals and slides will detract from you message. When is comes to presentations, you should try to be as succinct as possible while still communicating all you need to.

Principle 2: You should be the primary source of the presentation. Most presenters use PowerPoint slides as their primary source of information. But your slides should really only be there to support the things you say and do.

Principle 3: Visuals are key! Use data charts to plot financial figures, use flowcharts to illustrate processes, or even use simple photographs to illustrate more abstract points. People are much more likely to remember and understand what you have to say if you combine your spoken words with an effective visual. Need some tips? Check out this article with some easy tips to improve your charts and graphs.

Principle 4: Think carefully about the sequence of your slides. Ensure that your presentation flows effectively and if you have a single slide that contains a lot of information, consider sequencing that information using animation.

More Articles for Better Presentations

Plan your presentation: This should go without saying. You should always be sure to plan and practice your presentations. This article will give you some great questions to help you think about while researching the conent and some guidelines for how long your presentation should be.

Improve Your Presentations With Visuals (and save your most used visuals!): SmartDraw is great for transforming those boring bullet points to effect visuals. Plus, you can save your most used slides in SmartDraw libraries!

Plan and Present with Visuals: Learn how visuals like storyboards can help you plan your presentation and ensure your presentation will flow for maximum impact.

Include Killer Visuals Everytime: It can be difficult to create the perfect visual when you are not a graphic designer, but SmartDraw allows anyone and everyone create visuals that will leave an impression and create the impact you are looking for.

If you have not already, be sure to download a trial of SmartDraw today and improve your presentations instantly!

Need a great presentation to convince someone or a group of people? The key is showing the right visuals, in the best way. This may sound intimidating, but SmartDraw makes this easy. Just follow these three easy steps so that your audience is both engaged and comprehends your message - and you'll close the deal!

Step 1: Choose the right chart

Step 2: Build your chart with real data and visual impact

Step 3: Present your charts one step at a time

Choosing the Right Chart

Visuals can make or break a presentation or proposal. Your visuals should support your message clearly and concisely. The right chart depends on the message. As with any presentation, you must first understand the message you wish to convey. After that, you can choose the right data set and choose the right chart. Here are some of your choices:

Relative Value Chart

If your message is about share or distribution of a total, a pie chart or relative value chart is appropriate. If you are comparing shares from different categories, then a stacked bar chart worked better than multiple pie charts.

Bar Chart

If your message is about a comparison of values, the bar chart is the most appropriate. You can also use a bar chart to compare multiple sets of data. However, I'd recommend you not compare more than two or three, as your chart will become difficult to follow.

If you have multiple categories, such as years or product lines, a grouped bar chart or a pairing of bar charts works best.

Line Chart

If your message is to show a trend over time or when you have many data points, line charts are more effective than bar charts. The line chart not only shows the values, but also gives a visual feel for the rates of change. You can even build a stacked line chart, which is similar to a stacked bar chart, which will show the overall trends and contributing factors to those trends.

Building Your Chart for Impact

Using Real Data (Easily)

With SmartDraw, you have the option of manually inputting and adjusting your data or importing your data from a program like Excel. When you start building your chart, clicking on a bar, or any other data point, displays its value in an edit field. You can type a new value directly into the field and the value for the data point will be changed to match it.

If you already have a table of data, you can simply paste it into the SmartDraw template to apply the data to your visual. The bars or points of the chart adopt the values in the table. The columns of the table become categories and the rows become series. If the first row contains text labels, these become the category labels. If the first column contains text labels, these become the names of the series.

Creating that Visual Impact

You've got your message, your data, and the right chart type. But how do you make it persuasive and memorable? You may want to consider incorporating images into your charts. Image charts are not only eye-catching and memorable, but also help your audience grasp quantities and relative values quickly. For example, compare this relative value chart without and with pictures. Which is more eye-catching?

If you do not feel an image chart is appropriate, you can still follow some guidelines to make sure the chart supports your message as strongly as possible. SmartDraw already provides automatic formatting and themes to ensure your visuals are impactful and professional, but also allows you the freedom to modify the colors. Using color or lack of color to compare, contrast, and highlight the portions of your visual that align with you message are key. The key is to balance these alterations with simplicity. Be careful not to clutter your chart with too many gridlines, data labels, and axis labels. Only show what is needed to draw the viewer to your message.

Presenting Your Charts One Step at a Time

Charts are particularly useful in communicating data in a presentation. SmartDraw makes it possible for you to reveal your chart in a series of steps, rather than all at once. This is by far the most effective way to present data. As presentation expert Rick Altman explains in Why Most PowerPoint® Presentations Suck and How to Make them Better, showing a visual to your audience all at once can be overwhelming. Your audience will be too busy trying to absorb all the information to focus on the specific point you are trying to make. Rick calls this "drinking from the fire hose." Instead, it is better to reveal the visual in a series of steps. Rick calls this "sequencing."

Here is an example of a graph that could use some sequencing:

This graph is a lot of information at once! Here's how we can present the same information, along with commentary along the way, using sequencing. You will quickly see how much easier it is to absorb the data.

Taking the information in steps, your audience can follow the presentation with much greater comprehension than by trying to digest the entire graph at once. Sequencing makes the presentation of this graph more informative, more understandable, and more interesting. Best of all, SmartDraw will do this for you!

So, what are you waiting for? If you haven't already, download a trial of SmartDraw and improve your presentations today!

While the reality is that most of our New Years Resolutions have already gone out the window, many of us still have businesses to run and jobs that we’d like to keep. Most of us have great hopes and dreams to continually stay organized, but it is difficult to know where to start. Luckily, I have some suggestions for you. SmartDraw is a great tool to reduce the extra time and steps to stay organized, yet still achieve your goals of organization and efficiency. Here are some of the ways SmartDraw can help:

Real Time Information Capture

The secret to short, effective, and interactive meetings is to capture the decisions and action items assigned during the meeting in a common document that each person can see as changes are made. You can do this by displaying a SmartDraw meeting template live to the entire group on a projector or via a shared desktop using an online meeting platform such as Webex or GoToMeeting. Typically, people attending meetings take their own private notes. Sometimes minutes of the meeting are published by one of the note takers, but not until later. This means any miscommunications or omissions do not surface until after the meeting is over or perhaps not at all. SmartDraw leads to truly interactive hands-on collaboration sessions. Even better, with the format of the meetings template, project planners can easily turn the mind map agenda into a project chart with just a click of a button. Learn more about how to run meetings with SmartDraw in this article.

Instant Accountability

SmartDraw’s meeting template allows you create instant accountability with the Assignment View. This is a view with the people as the topics and the tasks they are to perform as sub-topics. Doing this live so that everyone in the meeting can see what tasks they are being assigned and see what tasks others are being assigned results in clear communication and creates accountability. Plus, when you update anything in the Assignment View, including assignments, percentages complete, or even the renaming of tasks, the Project Chart is dynamically updated. This saves you time and limits inconsistencies in items discussed in meetings and results in projects.

Compelling Presentations

How often do you walk away from a presentation without any memory of what was presented? This is common because most presentations are just a compilation of slides with boring bullet points. Visual presentations are much more likely to leave a lasting, clear impression. SmartDraw allows you to import your data from Excel (or other data sources) to create impactful charts and graphs, plus reveal your visuals in a series of steps. Even the best visual can be ineffective if displayed in the wrong way in your presentation. Showing a visual to your audience all at once can be overwhelming, so it’s better to reveal the visual by sequencing it.

When you have more compelling presentations, you are more likely to make the impact that you are hoping to. Check out some of the tips we’ve put together here.

Increased Process Efficiency

Despite many benefits of business process documentation, many organizations resist documenting their processes because of the pain that traditional methods inflict. Many companies desire the benefits of documented processes without the pain, which is why Visual Process Management (VPM) is the best solution. VPM boasts all the gain and none of the pain. VPM boosts process efficiency by helping companies identify who performs what tasks and how these tasks can be improved. A VPM Collection is a complete digital model of an organization’s structure and business processes. In a VPM Collection every process is linked with the position responsible for executing and managing it. Information is presented visually instead of text alone. Interested in learning more and how to get started? Check out this article with just a few simple steps.

Not sure how to get started with business process documentation facilitation? Check out this article with some tips from SmartDraw’s Training and Development Manager.

Keeping it all Together

How long do you typically spend finding that one document that you never seem to be able to find, but always seem to need? SmartDraw’s hub template is great for a quick and easy way to organize your documents, links, and other SmartDraw files. Plus, it is also a great tool for your team or even to help train new employees. Instead of giving your new employee a thick binder full of information or a long laundry list of links, hubs allow you to communicate a wealth of information organized into logical, easily-digestible groupings.

Check out these simple instructions for making your own hub and some quick tips.

Better Communication = More Success

Everyone wants to be running and a part of a successful company, which means they should focus on improving communication within the organization. If everyone in the company has SmartDraw, the company strategic goal of “improving communication” can be addressed at the same time and by everyone.

If you have not tried out SmartDraw yet, be sure to download a trial today.

This week SmartDraw Software added two new editions of SmartDraw 2012: Business and Enterprise. Both of the new editions build on the features and functionality of the SmartDraw 2012 Standard Edition, adding new powerful features that businesses have been requesting. We have already gotten a lot of positive feedback about our new product line, but we wanted to back up to explain why we made this choice and discuss what is ahead.

As SmartDraw has grown, we have had an increasing number of requests for more powerful business features. Recently we took a hard look at our product today, thought about the direction we are heading, and what our customers want. We realized that we have different types of SmartDraw users and some of our more advanced features are not relevant to everyone. So, rather than burden our Standard Edition, we decided to add two new editions, each with an increasing number of more powerful features. This will not only allow us to maintain the product that our customers have come to know and love at a low price, but also allow us to continue to grow and develop SmartDraw while still offering the same level of support we always have to our current and future customers.

The 2012 Standard Edition is specifically designed to improve project collaboration, communication, and implementation with a number of new features. The Business Edition takes this even further giving our business customers a powerful new way to create visual PowerPoint presentations and easy integration with SharePoint. Targeted toward project managers and their teams, the Enterprise Edition includes even more advanced features, including the ability to import/export capability with Microsoft Project, the ability to import files from Microsoft Visio, and the ability to build and share Visual Process Management (VPM) collections.

But this is only the beginning! While we plan to continue to improve all of our editions, we have even more in store for the Business and Enterprise Editions. So, for our customers who purchase Business or Enterprise Editions, we decided to include one year of free Platinum Protection, SmartDraw’s maintenance plan. This means all of our coming improvements and new updates to project planning and workgroups are included at no extra cost!

Our new product line allows us to keep the pricing of SmartDraw 2012 Standard Edition at a low $197 per license. As a special offer to our existing customers who purchase by February 17^th, 2012, we are offering the ability to buy up to 10 copies of SmartDraw 2012 at the Standard Edition price and we’ll give them the Enterprise Edition for free. This is a savings of $300 per copy and a steal, since this means you will also be getting the free year of Platinum Protection! Plus, for a limited time, we will be offering a discounted upgrade to our Enterprise Edition of $99 until February 17^th, 2012. To order at these special prices, customers can contact SmartDraw at 1-800-768-3729.

Furthermore, if you have not yet purchased SmartDraw, but downloaded a trial after August 1, 2012, we’ll offer you these same deals in pricing until February 17^th!

I'm delighted to announce that SmartDraw has two new additions to our SmartDraw 2012 product line: SmartDraw 2012 Business and SmartDraw 2012 Enterprise, our premium edition. So what is the difference between these editions?

SmartDraw 2012 Business Edition boasts:

• Everything in SmartDraw 2012 Standard
• A powerful new way to create visual PowerPoint presentations
• Full integration with SharePoint, including SharePoint 2010

SmartDraw 2012 Enterprise Edition goes even further with:

• Everything in SmartDraw 2012 Standard and SmartDraw 2012 Business
• Brand new import and export to Microsoft Project
• Import from Visio, including Visio 2010
• Visual Process Management, which allows you to build networks of linked process documentation and automatically map responsibilities for each process to a position in your organization

Targeted towards project managers and their teams, the Enterprise Edition offers the features of both the Standard and Business Editions. In addition, it gives you the ability to import from and export to Microsoft Project's file format, the ability to import files from Microsoft Visio, and enables you to build and share VPM collections.

SmartDraw 2012 Product Line summarized:

SmartDraw Guest Post: This post is written by Wade Lutgen, who has worked as a computer graphics programmer for the past 12 years. Using SmartDraw to outline the programming elements, he developed a game for the iPhone and iPad, called Hungry Helga. At the end of this blog post, you will find the original SmartDraw files Wade uses. Be sure to download them and explore them yourself!

In early 2010, I decided to try my hand at making a game for the iPhone and iPad. After some brainstorming, I came up with an idea for a 2D fishing game. With the input from a creative friend, this eventually transformed into a beautiful and light-hearted Viking themed game called Hungry Helga.

Once the prototype was done and the ideas for the game were fleshed out, I settled on the idea that the players would simply tap the screen to shoot cannons in order to get fish. Of course, the game gets progressively more difficult as the fish learn to avoid the cannons! With all these details, I needed a way to outline the components of what would eventually become a fairly large software project, with many interconnected classes. SmartDraw was exactly what I needed. Even though I hadn't used the software before, it only took me about half an hour to get it installed and get up to speed with how the features I needed to use worked.

The first thing I needed was a class diagram to account for all the planned in-game objects and to display their C++ class hierarchies. The UML diagram template worked great for this and this is what I built:

I really liked the ability to choose from several different pre-made shapes when creating the diagram. This allowed me to use larger shapes for the base classes so that I had space to describe their functionality and use the more compact shapes to list the many specific characters and game objects derived from those base classes.

Next, I needed to do a rough layout of the classes I needed for the game engine. The engine is the part of the game program that performs various loading, saving, and utility functions, but is not necessarily specific to any particular game. The result of the diagram can be seen below. Unlike in the diagram above, the arrows don't represent a class hierarchy, but rather the operational relationships that the classes have to one another. Being able to add text inside the arrows made this clear.

Using SmartDraw to put together diagrams saved me a great deal of time when it came to writing the code and managing the relationships between the large number of classes to make Hungry Helga. In the end, the class hierarchy and game engine for Hungry Helga turned out to be very close to this design. Organizing everything ahead of time and having a visual representation of the code really helped! I plan to use SmartDraw for my future projects, too.

Here are the SmartDraw files I used:

Game-Objects.sdr

Game-Engine.sdr

There are so many great ways to connect with the SmartDraw community, I thought I would round them all up for you! You can always contact the support team with questions using this handy form, call us at 1-800-768-3729 or 858-225-3300, or email support@smartdraw.com - but you can also connect with us and other SmartDraw customers on your favorite social media sites.

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