What our customer's say!

"Not suitable for a 21st century business",
Once a worthy page layout program, it was abandoned by its makers in 2002 and support for it is negligible at best. I have yet to find a third-party support book for Version 10. I would emphasize right HERE that this program is NOT for novices nor BUSINESSES!

True, all of the 'features' may have cost $10,000 extra for Quark Express - in 1998 - but today these features (and many, many others) are standard in both Quark Express and InDesign, which are both widely used and supported. It is more stable than Quark 4.0, I will give it that - but Quark last put that out in 1999. Even a modern version of MS Word can create a business report that is equal to Ventura's capabilities.

Like Corel's other offerings, many commonly used features are buried within menus. The more useful panels, which control the frames and tables, are buried in the menus, and cover a good section of the screen - and the portions of the work you are adjusting. If you need to adjust another part of the page - close the panel, and open it up again. All very tedious and time-consuming compared to other programs.

Another annoyance is the "Tags" - in every other program, style sheets. If you need to bold one word, using the standard "click the B icon" the entire tag for paragraphs gets change to reflect that one minor change. So you have to create a new paragraph or character style sheet EVERY time you want to make a minor variation to text - even to see if it "works". The other text handling features are rudimentary at best.

It really deserves one star - but since I have worked with MS Publisher (which is far worse) I have to give it two.

"Stable Desktop Publishing Powerhouse", Ventura has always offered more features per dollar than its rival desktop publishing programs (some experts who use them all estimate it would cost $10,000 in add-ins for Quark Express to have all the features included with Ventura). I've tried some of the others, but none really can match the ease of use and power of Ventura 8, and now Ventura 10. Ventura is simply the best for publishing books, newsletters, magazines, brochures, flyers, and catalogs.

New to Version 10 is a great "Publish to PDF" feature that turns your Ventura documents into letter perfect PDF files with a few clicks of the mouse. Ventura's modeless cursor really speeds up production as does its built-in Database Publisher which enabled us to produce over 300 fully formated pages of our book "International Job Finder" in an afternoon -- including two extensive indexes! The Navigator makes it easy to change the order of chapters in a document and easily track down index entries, markers, and cross references.

I won't pretend Ventura 10 is perfect -- it was designed to run only in Windows XP and 2000. But it is very stable; bugs are no worse than what its competition offer. Since I started using version 8 several years ago, I have not had to call Tech Support even once. There's an incredible newgroup of Ventura users (at cnews.corel.ca, under corel.graphic_apps) around the world who can quickly -- and accurately -- answer any question you proffer.