Edraw MaxComments on:

By: central vacuums

central vacuums — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:28:02 +0000

Looks different, I hope that it should be effective too.

By: Allison

Allison — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:03:11 +0000

My installation reverted to Trial as well.
I have 1 day left on mine, and it says the same thing:

The activate code has been used in other computers.

I was really interested in using this program, but now I guess I will not be able to unless someone can provide everyone with a different license code.

By: Phil_S

Phil_S — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:16:34 +0000

My installation reverted to Trial, too.

“The activate code has been used in other computers.”

By: Consumer

Consumer — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 05:30:38 +0000

I had a chance to try this out for an actual need, creating a land survey type of document as required for a building permit where I live. As everything needed to be to scale, I went through the effort of setting up everything so I could place objects on the screen and fix their sizes to their real world equivalents.

That’s where the problems came in with Edraw Max. It seemed that for every object I placed in my survey, I had to manually set the scale, and the length multiple times if the unit didn’t stick properly. Trying to set things scale equal to the page setup didn’t seem to work. It’s like there’s a disconnect between settings for a file being worked on, and the default program settings when placing something new in a file. What made it worse is the simply insufficient help system. Not only is there no help system, but no user base large enough to have an online community to go to.

After taking about 30 minutes to get about 4 or 5 objects placed correctly, sized correctly, and displaying the proper units, I decided to download a trial of Visio Professional. What a difference!

It took me a couple of minutes to get the page setup changes working correctly, but after that, it was much, MUCH easier to work with the objects I was trying to handle. I could manually type in the lengths (in their real world sizes) and positions of objects if I wanted to. No playing around with scale, no fidgeting around with 5 extra settings per object to get it to do what I wanted, just drop the objects, set the length attributes I wanted, and stick them where they needed to go. If I needed some help, online help was there to help… most of the time.

Visio isn’t perfect. It’s a little clunky, like they know they have captive customers, and it has some bland looking graphics. If I had to work with a program like Edraw Max on a regular basis, I’d have to absorb the pain and shell out for Visio, as I would go nuts spending more than a few days of my life doing something as unproductive as working with such not-yet-ready-for-business software. It took me about 3 or 4 hours to do what I needed to do in Visio. At the rate I was going, it would have taken me 3 or 4 days in Edraw Max.

Edraw Max has a lot going for it, but needs a some quality control work put into it before it can be a valuable alternative to Visio.

By: Neslock

Neslock — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:59:35 +0000

#192, mine is now marked as a trial version as well, with 27 days remaining, even though the license name and code used to register it are still listed in the program’s boxes.

By: corpower

corpower — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:54:44 +0000

After using it a couple of times, it now says the trial period is ending and requires payment. The reg. key is no longer valid and is described as being used already. Duh?!!

By: BloughMee

BloughMee — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:56:03 +0000

#101 – there is no “copyright” of the office ribbon a a whole. Microsoft has trade-protected whatever they can of course, but good luck enforcing that. Actually, it’s smart for developers to mimic a well-known UI… and Microsoft should welcome it as it drives acceptance of their interface(s).

I will say though…. doing that isn’t always appropriate. Exmaple – the very good Snag-It program by Techsmith went to a Word-like “ribbon” interface with version 9. Thing is… it ain’t Word, it’s a graphics program so the new interface is a bad fit… it takes more clicks to do the same thing… and features/settings that used to be front-and-center are now buried three-clicks deep.

By: Keith Reha

Keith Reha — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:42:35 +0000

One of the most NON-CUSTOMER ORIENTED companies I’ve ever dealt with. You’re on your own if you expect to get any help from these people. To them… ALL THAT MATTERS IS MONEY…. NOT THE CUSTOMER !

By: Polly

Polly — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:39:28 +0000

Electrical Engineering? FALSE CLAIM on that one guys… there is a HUGE DIFFERNCE between what an Electrical Engineer does and what an ELECTRICIAN does… which is NOT ENGINEERING in the minutest form!

4+ years of grueling college and super advanced Math courses, physics, chemistry and MUCH more go into the higher education an Electrical ENGINEER has to accomplish – and they have nothing to do with wiring homes, hooking up electrical boxes or switches which is what an ELECTRICIAN does.

Smarten up guys and gals! This software doesn’t come close to what an Electrical ENGINEER does in their work. Polly

By: gokudomatic

gokudomatic — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:31:50 +0000

for those who missed this GAOTD, there is the not-so-bad freeware Dia, coming from linux world and using GTK. It’s sometime better that Visio because it’s much simpler.
http://dia-installer.de/index_en.html