Introduction to Corel Draw 10

Presentation of the Corel Draw 10 manual and description of the most basic tools.

Corel Draw 10 is one of the most powerful and versatile graphics editing programs out there. It allows you to create a wide variety of effects and a large number of objects. Along with Corel Draw there are also other graphic programs such as Corel Photo-paint, which is used for graphic retouching, Corel Capture, which is used to take screenshots, or Corel Texture, which is used to make textures for fills.

These older programs are very easy to use and mastering Corel Draw 10 there are no problems understanding them.

Once Corel Draw 10 is installed, the work area will be a screen like the following:

At the top is the menu bar, with the File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, Tools, Table, Window, and ? menus. The content of these menus will be developed throughout this manual.

Below the menu bar is the bar with the buttons, new, open, save, paste, cut, copy and next to them there are two important buttons that are import and export:

Keep in mind that when you save a Corel Draw file, it does so with the cdr extension, but to be able to open files in other formats such as jpg or gif you have to use the import button, which will open a window for us to select the file to import. You can import the entire file or a part of it, for which you have to select the crop option, which will allow you to import the part you want from the image you have selected.

On the right are the color palettes. On the left the toolbox and at the bottom the status bar, which shows information about what we are editing.

The Export button allows us to save what we have done with Corel Draw in another format other than cdr, being able to save it as a jpg, gif, bmp file… We must bear in mind that when we save a file with a format other than cdr and return it to open, we have to select the import option.

At the top is the property bar consisting of the following elements:

On the left is the box to select the type of paper on which we are going to work, A4, A5… and to the right are the measurements of the paper to work on, in this case it would be an A4 with 210 mm width and 297 mm high, we can modify these measurements and then we would be in the personalized paper format.

Next to the right is the orientation of the paper, if we want it horizontally or vertically.

These two buttons are used to establish the orientation of the paper, the button above is used so that whenever we insert a new page it is done with the same orientation and the button below is used to break the established order and change and alternate the orientation of the pages .

The button on the right is used to establish the distance that the selected object is going to move every time we use the movement keys of the keyboard and we can modify the distance.

The button on the left is used to establish how far away the duplicated object will be located from the original.

These three buttons serve to magnetize the objects. The one in the center is for snapping objects to the guide lines, and the one on the left is for snapping objects to other objects.