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Summary: The new user!
Review: I currently use this program for the photo aspect, but I have begun using the greeting cards and web sends. I enjoy working with this program, it is easy to learn comes with a great deal of images and was worth the price for the new commer. I have had the program for three weeks now and have had no conflicts with other software and really enjoy playing with all the functions. I have heard how good some of the more expensive programs are and I believe for those who are only using this at home, you should not waste a couple hundred dollars on a program you will spend too much time learning. This program is best for new users.
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Summary: Many great possibilities !
Review: I discovered Picture-It when I was looking for software that would let me print frames around my photos. And it does this - plus much more.I have been creating lots of printed photos from my travels and family gatherings. And everyone loves the neat frames (borders) around them. I share them with friends and use magnets to hold lots of them on my refrigerator. You can create your own custom calendars easily also. So many great photo projects. And of course you can do great greeting cards, too. I create half-fold cards on glossy greeting card paper and people can't tell I printed them myself at home (HP P1100). I print a small for-keeps self-photo on the back of the card as a nice "extra." It prints on the glossy side; so they get a nice personalized greeting card and a picture they can keep if they want to cut it out before disposing of the card. The software walks you through the steps necessary to create/customize nice results. You can create excellent output for printing, for sharing by email, for posting to a web site, and even for sending to an online photo-printing service. I feel I got more than my money's worth with this product.... especially after the $15 rebate, and with the great pack of sample papers included in the box. There are about 10 cd's with this software. But not all of it is installed to the hard-drive during installation. When you select certain items from the "catalog" (index), you can see which cd it is on before you select it. I find that I use artwork from cd #2 a lot. So I copied the contents of that CD to my hard-drive. (When the software asks you to insert a particular CD, you can click "options" and specify a different location where it should look for the CD.) And you can download additional clip-art and projects from the internet...many for free. You can also use picture-it to catalog your photos - - even if they are on removable media (cd's, zip disks, etc.). It can create multimedia gretting cards. I didn't expect great things from this software because of the low price and the $15 rebate; but I definitely got a lot more than I ever imagined. And I've only had it 3 days! It's just what I needed. My setup: (hardware/software/etc.) - Digital Camera: Kodak DC4800 - Printer: HP Photosmart P1100xi - Paper: HP Glossy Greeting Card (half-fold) - Paper: HP Premium Glossy Photo Paper (all sizes) - Windows 2000 - Paper Trimmer: Fiskars 12-inch rotary
Rating: 
Summary: Major Problems!
Review: I have had nothing but problems with Microsoft Picture It! Publishing Platinum. I installed it on a brand new computer and it has caused nothing but problems. It freezes and nothing but unplugging the computer will clear it out! I keep getting error messages and it won't print after a picure is scanned. It took me about six hours to print up a simple greeting card with a scanned picture on it!
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Summary: picture it ,pictures it perfect...
Review: I really love all the different arrangements and reading this programs does for me. I am able to run all my other programs and extentions through it and with it. Many other programs I have used, are not as conjunctive. I highly recommend "picture it" to anyone who likes to play with and share photos.
I was fortunate to have had "picture it express" included with my computor purchase. ...
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Summary: Excedrin headache in convenient CDROM format. Thanks Bill.
Review: I saw that many other people had issues with the install time and that they had also received errors and illegal operations. I am glad to hear this because I was afraid I was the only person who had these problems. This program would not print AT ALL. I have 3 printers, HP 520, HP 660 and the new HP Photosmart 1000. The program would die when you tried printing anything. It did this on multiple PCs as well. The space this program requires is obscene at best. I saw people saying this package is good for the beginner. Not even close. I have been building and configuring PCs and installing every software known to man for over 10 years and this program had me at my wits end on more than one occassion. As I write this I am TRYING to uninstall the software from my wifes PC. It has taken well over 1 hour to get half way done. Do yourself a favor, just go ahead and buy Publisher 2000. It costs more, but is definately worth it. Well, the 97 version was well worth the cash. I have the 2000 version sitting here. If Picture it will ever finish uninstalling I will install Publisher 2000. Just when I think Microsoft has really gotten it's act together along comes this piece of junk.
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Summary: I wish I had read these reviews before I bought.
Review: I too am very upset with the bad software from microsoft. I can't even load the program. It claims to be Windows 2000 compatible. When attempting to install I get an error message telling me I have -2048MB of memory and 32MB is the minimum. In fact, I have 2048MB or 2GB of memory. Again a stupid assumption on the part of microsoft that nobody would ever have that much memory. With a minus memory amount the program will not load. After reading the reviews I guess I should be happy, but like most I am out of pocket for the cost.
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Summary: Great Program - Easy to Use!!
Review: MS Picture It Publishing 2001 combines Picture It Photo with Greetings Workshop/Home Publishing. The end result is a terrifically well integrated program which allows you to edit your photos, store them in a gallery, and use them for publishing to paper, web, e-mail, etc. You can make all the usual paper projects, including greeting cards, banners, letterhead, business cards, etc. But you can also place your very own pictures in your projects to send to family, friends, or publish to the web. This is an excellent integration of two solid programs. Good for beginners and more seasoned folks alike. It doesn't have all the tools of a Jasc Pain Shop Pro or ULead's Photo Impact, but for a quick and very easy project its great because its so fast to learn!
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Summary: Nothing but trouble
Review: My husband and I bought this software from [a store]. I've used Printmaster and Microsoft Home Publishing Suite to create school newsletters. The description on the Picture It box looked promising. It convinced me that it was better than what I've been using. I thought it would be perfect for our brand new super duper computer. The time it took to install this software (the maximum installation) was tolerable. However, this software has BIG PROBLEMS! Picture It kept crashing ("illegal operation, must be shut down"). When we ran "windoctor" to find out what the error was about, it said that there was a missing file (that, or it could not access it). The file was a Picture It "dll" file. When we ran all 7 discs through "find file" command, no such file could be found either. We consulted the Microsoft customer service, and we uninstalled and reinstalled many times using different techniques that were told to us by Microsoft customer service people. The problems didn't go away, and even created more problems. Sometimes, even when we were only sending an e-mail, we'd get a pop-up message that said we needed to put the Picture It disc in the drive (really strange!). On one other installation, the image icons would not appear. Eventually, we returned the software to [the store], and then bought another Picture It, hoping that maybe we had a bad box the first time. The second Picture It box we bought had the same problems. We tried installing on our other computers (we have four computers in the house), but the same problem existed. We returned the second box, and we don't intend to buy a third. Good luck with it if you buy one!!!
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Summary: Microsoft Picture-IT Publisher Platinum
Review: My system came with Picture-It Express. An interesting applet but as all Microsoft -Express apps it had only a fraction of the functionality of it's pay-for-it cousin. For retouching digital photos it is awesome! For publishing to personal web site...it..well it's not so good at all. It took me several tries to upload the webpages and once it was uploaded the website was cast in stone. There is no facility in this product to edit or update a website once it's uploaded. Further, it has the same myopic Microsoft upper/lower case problems, it defines sever html files as lower case but makes them uppercase. NT would not care whereas a unix webserver DOES.
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Summary: Great For The Beginner
Review: OK, here we go again. If you read my review of Picture-It 2000, you'll probably notice that I liked that program for what it was intended to do, which is hold your hand through just about every phase of editiing a photograph. Well, this latest version still does just that. You can't miss with this program if you're just getting into the digital photo editing game. What's happened here from what I can tell (please keep in mind that I've only been playing in this program for about a week) is that PI Platinum has combined Picture It and Home Publisher for the most part. Only MUCH bigger! If you do a full install of this program you'll use up just around 3 gig of your hard drive. There are more photos, clip art and templates in this thing than anyone could ever hope to use. There'll be another version out before you use all this stuff! There's seven discs to this program and even with the full install there's still some disc swapping to do, although it is fairly minimal. The big thing here, and I can't stress this enough, is how easy this program is to use. And new to this version is the free web posting. Microsoft gives you a list of no-fee sites (of which MSN is one of the choices) as well as a list of fee-based sites. There are a few things I don't like about this program and the worst in my opinion is the cloning tool. Once you position the marker and begin to clone, it becomes very difficult at times to see where you're cloning from because the marker tends to vanish and you can lose track of where it is. Picture It 2000 had the same problem. The other negative is that there aren't a lot of "special" effects in here. Again, just like Picture It 2000. Aside from the minor quirks, PI Platinum 2001 is pretty decent. I do photography professionally, so I use Photoshop 5.5 and U-Lead Photo Impact for most of my work, but for quick e-mailing and general puttzing around, a program like this or Photo Deluxe 4.0 is a must. Finally, and I said the same thing in the review I did on Photo Deluxe 4.0, ULead Photo Impact gives you so much more and it's not a difficult program to use. But if you want an all-encompassing program where you can edit your pictures, create countless cards, calendars, stationery, and just about anything else, plus easy and quick e-mailing and web posting, you can't beat Picture It Publishing Platinum 2001.
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