I got a phone call from a potential customer yesterday with questions about CorelDRAW X6 Unleashed. Now keep in mind that these same questions could apply to pretty much any version of CorelDRAW and/or any industry. This person said they had just purchased CorelDRAW X6 and they only need to know how to do two very basic tasks. Which tasks isn’t as important as the naive thought that they only needed to learn those two tasks.

Given that a program like CorelDRAW can perform hundreds if not thousands of tasks, there are many more than two things that need to be learned just to perform the two tasks. This is also true of most any other high-end software. If you want to get value from that software, you have to invest some time into learning exactly how it works.

I still remember going to an industry event a few years back. I met some users who had invested thousands of dollars in hardware that was driven by artwork from CorelDRAW. They were at the event to improve the profitability of their business. During the event they showed a notebook of artwork from previous clients and projects. One of the manufacturers reps called me aside and we talked about the notebook.

In short, their artwork wasn’t very good. OK, that’s being too nice. Their artwork was awful. It was the weak point in their business. They had great hardware. Their sales skills were good. But unless they made an effort to improve their artwork, the business would remain stagnant or simply cease to exist. Yet they had no interest in learning anything more about using CorelDRAW. Unfortunately this is a very common reaction. As I was talking to the potential customer who only want to learn how to do those two simple tasks, I kept having flashbacks of the artwork I saw in that notebook.

People invest thousands in having good hardware for outputting artwork. Training and seminars on being better at sales are a billion dollar business. But it is just as important to know your software inside and out so you can get the most from your sales skills and expensive hardware. Therefore if CorelDRAW is one of those software tools you use, you really should take the step of getting good training on it. I’m definitely biased, but I don’t think you will find a better training value than CorelDRAW X6 Unleashed. For those using older versions, we’ve got you covered there too.