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Summitt New MediaReviewsPublish It Deluxe |
Macmillan Publishing
1998
As you may know, Mary and I are also the publishers and editors of The Summitt Family Quarterly, a genealogical newsletter for descendants of the Sammet, Summit, and Summitt colonists. As a result, I've used several desktop publishing applications over the years publishing the newsletter.
Just so you know where I'm coming from on this, I began with Ventura Publisher for DOS, worked for a while with another DOS product called Publish It Lite, moved on to Adobe PageMaker and then settled on Microsoft Publisher.
Macmillan asked me if I'd like to review Publish It Deluxe and I said yes. I received a large, well decorated box that told me how good the product was and, inside, a small CD case containing four CDs. That's it. Nothing else. No documentation.
The back of the CD case gives the system requirements as:
- Pentium P90 Processor (recommended minimum)
- Windows® 98, Windows® 95, or Windows NT®
- CD-ROM Drive
- 16 MB Ram
- 60 MB minimum free hard drive space
- SVCA card capable of 256 colors at 800 x 600 resolution
These requirements eliminated several of my machines from even being considered as host to this package. The back of the CD case also says insert the first CD-ROM into your drive and click on the start menu. I installed it on my fastest machine first and then on my laptop.
First, let me say the lack of documentation, both hard copy and on-line, is enough for me to pan this product. The program is more cumbersome and difficult to work with than the early versions of Ventura Publisher for DOS I started with.
It took me forever to realize that if you don't have the CD-ROM in the drive, none of the Wizards work. I use my laptop a great deal of the time and don't bother taking the CD-ROM drive with me. That means I can't use the product.
When I was fully sure that I did not like the product is when I discovered the worst part. When I tried to uninstall from the laptop the uninstall program crashed. It took me hours to clean every part of that program out of the laptop. It was worse on the desktop. Uninstall worked but it also took my scanner software with it when it left.
This product should be a definite pass on the software shelves. Macmillan needs to pull it off the shelves themselves and send it back to the programmers. The only redeeming value of this product is the graphic collection it has. The other three CDs are packed with some interesting artwork but don't buy the package just for this..