In our last class, we explored the CorelDRAW Interface and its “4+ levels.” Of all these, I emphasized that toolbars are the foundation of your design workflow—and within toolbars, five stand out as the true chiefs. Among these, the “Toolbox” is the most powerful clan. Here’s an overview:
1. Menu Bar
The Menu Bar contains drop-down menus (like File, Edit, View, Layout, etc.) at the top of the screen. You can access almost every CorelDRAW feature via these menus. For example, anything related to files—such as creating new files, saving, or printing—can be found under the File menu. The available menus and options might differ slightly depending on your CorelDRAW version. For this class, we won’t dwell long on the Menu Bar, since most essential functions can also be accessed by other toolbars and shortcuts.
2. Status Bar
The Status Bar runs along the bottom of your workspace. It displays information about selected objects, your cursor position, and color details (such as fill/outline colors). You’ll also see file save or export progress here, so you know when CorelDRAW is processing something.
3. Standard Toolbar
The Standard Toolbar provides quick access to frequently used commands—the developers know you’ll need these tools often. Instead of navigating through menus, you can one-click to open a new file, save, cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, and more.
4. Property Bar
The Property Bar is context-sensitive—it always shows controls related to the currently selected tool or object. When nothing is selected, it helps with document-wide settings: like page size, orientation, measurement units, nudge distance, and duplicate distance (X & Y). When an object is selected, it shows object-specific options: such as position (X & Y), size, rotation, mirroring, and more. For example:
- Text: font family, font size
- Images: Edit Bitmap, Trace Bitmap
- Ellipse/Circle: type (ellipse, pie, arc)
- Rectangle: corner options
It reflects the mathematical basis of graphics: CorelDRAW uses a two-dimensional workspace (X and Y), similar to a Cartesian plane.
5. Toolbox
The Toolbox is the most important clan in your toolbar kingdom—almost every tool you need for drawing, editing, and manipulating objects lives here. Arranged vertically by default (often on the left), it contains tools for selection (like the Pick Tool), creating shapes, drawing lines, editing nodes, applying color, adding text, and more. I describe the Pick Tool as the “king” of this clan—we’ll cover it in detail in our next class.
Aside from these five, CorelDRAW has other useful toolbars such as the Text Toolbar, Dimension Toolbar, Internet Toolbar, and Zoom Toolbar, as well as additional interface features like the Rulers, Guidelines, Grids, Document Navigator, Scroll Bars, and Page Tabs. The availability and arrangement of these toolbars and features may vary depending on your CorelDRAW version and your customized workspace settings.
Next class
We will focus specifically on the Toolbox—and especially the Pick Tool—exploring why it is called the “king” of all tools.