I decided to do a separate help fie that looks at the formats of text that you can use for the print merge function in CorelDraw. Typically most customers will be supplying you with text from either Microsoft Word or Excel. I will look at these two programs and show you how the text needs to be formatted. If you are getting information from other programs probably a CSV (commad delimited format) is the best

Although you can bring in an Excel file into CorelDraw using the CSV can be quite easy and more applicable for those that are not familiar with merging text. It is as easy as just saving the file as a different file format. Note: You must close the excel and CSV file before you can properly access the file in CorelDraw

One of the more requested topics that I get asked for is how to laser engrave photos on wood. Although a lot of your success is going to be dependent on the amount of testing that you do and the photos that you recieve from your clients there are some basic steps that you can take to make your chances of success a little more positive. There is nothing special here. All you need to remeber is that wood is porus and will not hold a fine detailed photo. So do not worry about getting rid of the detail in a photo. It make actually make your engraved photo look better.

This is a CorelDraw 9 file that has a bunch of car clipart. It is arranged in 5 pages

One of the more popular techniques used with photographs is turning that photograph in to what it is called a vignette. The vignette is a technique where you start to fad an image from a predetermined spot in a photo and fad it to nothing at the edge of the photo. Creating an an oval vignette is the most popular technique and is used extensively by photographers. In this article we will use the powerclip function in CorelDraw to create out oval cutout. Than we will use the vignette command in CorelDraw to create our vignette

A lot of times when you are working with photos you need to crop the photo so that you can focus in on a certain part of the photo. Typically what we are trying to do is to get rid of certain parts of the photo that we do not want. Cropping is the way to do this. There are a number of ways you can crop in CorelDraw. Sometimes it depends on the version that you are working in. For example a rectangle proper cropping tool was not available in CorelDraw until X4. In this article we will look at Power Clipping an image to do an oval crop in CorelDraw. To take it one step further we will look at doing an oval crop in Corel PhotoPaint

How many times have you brought an object into CorelDraw only to see a low resolution rendition of the image. I know I have have and there is a reason. Typically to try and get all the objects on the screen our default view is 100%. 100% view is based on the document not the image. To be able to view the image and see a good quality image we will need to zoom in it. Note: this is different in Corel PhotoPaint where the zoom view is based on the object not the document.

One of the new features to come out of Corel X4 and X5 is the ability to see what direction your machine will be moving based on the object. Typically when it comes to engraving whether it is with a laser or with a rotary our direction was controlled via two main nodes on the object you are working with. The home node is where you object begins to engrave. The end node is where the engraving ends. In earlier versions of Coreldraw X3 and before the way we had ot check for the beginning of an object was to select the shape tool click on the object and press the HOME key. This would take us to the beginning. The END key on your keyboard would take you to the end. Now with X4 and X5 we actually see the direction of the path by a set of arrows.

One of the problems that you will encounter after you install CorelDraw X4 or X5 is that your default pen width is set to .007. This creates a problem when you want to create a cut line for your laser. This is because most lasers will only cut a vector line that is less that .007. A vector line that is thicker than .006 is considered to be a raster line. For this reason it is advantageous to set the default pen width at hairline. This is easy to do in CorelDraw.