86 Tips for CorelDRAW

The manuals often hide secrets that we do not see or forget. These secrets we discover later in a second reading of the manual or show us somebody. Or maybe it’s more fun: we discover it for ourselves, as surely as it has ever happened to us. There are tricks that do not even come out in the manuals. Sure some of you already know many, but there are new Corelians every day eager to learn those secrets that help us work more effectively. Some only work in version 10, but many are worth for most versions. With them you will optimize your time working with CorelDRAW.

1.- Select: Double click on the selection tool select all objects in the document. We will use it in almost all our sessions with CorelDRAW.

2.- With the tool selection and dragging select all the objects that are completely within the selection frame.

Tips CorelDRAW 1CorelDRAW TipsWith the tool selection and dragging while pressing ALT select all the objects that are inside the selection frame and those that simply touch, even if they are not integers.

3.- To remove an object from a multiple selection, we select it again while we press uppercase.

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4.- To remove the selection without pressing outside the selection, press ESC . Very useful when we do not have holes in the screen to click where there are no objects.

5.- We can select objects that are behind others, but that we know they are there (in drawing lines display mode), pressing ALT while we select. This skips the first object in front, even if it is filled. If we press again select the next object below.

6.- We can select objects with any drawing tool by means of a click, as if it were the selection tool itself.

7.- To duplicate an object quickly we can select it, drag and, before releasing, to click with the right mouse button. If we want to duplicate it exactly where it is, the easiest thing is to press the + key when it is selected.

8.- When moving an object we can create copies by its displacement by pressing the space bar. If we press while CTRL , restricts movement to horizontal or vertical and also works.

9.- To navigate the screen with the keyboard, instead of the scroll bars, press ALT + direction arrows .

10.- Tool Zoom: click with the main button increases. Right click reduces. Without changing the zoom tool or touching the keyboard.

11.- To move by screen we have the navigator that there are where the scroll bars meet. If you click and drag, you move through the document. The rectangle shows the visible window. We can remove it quickly by pressing the N key.

12.- With the new option of micro-displacement, we can move with the arrows of the keyboard the value of displacement, with CTRL microdesplazamiento and with Shift , superdesplazamiento. We can customize your values ​​by double-clicking the rules.

13.- The guide lines can move them as if they were objects, and even select several at a time and can even be distributed. Also in version 10 there are 2 types of guide lines: normal and preset, which are placed automatically. They have different color to differentiate them from each other.

14.- The toolbox side deployables can be “detached” from the tool as if it were a new toolbar.

15.- To remove new toolbars from the property bar or from a toolbar and use them individually, select the element of the desired bar while pressing CTRL + ALT and drag it to the desktop. This creates a duplicate of the selected item.

If you just press ALT , you remove it from the toolbar or properties when you move it.

It is very useful if you want to move tool icons from one bar to another without opening the customization options.

16.- A little exploited utility of the program is New window of the window menu, so you do not have to be switching between normal visualization and drawing lines. With dual monitor graphic cards is phenomenal, because you can put the second window full screen on the other monitor and updated in each action. You can edit in either, or three, or four … Each has its own zoom and view, which gives more interest to this option.

17.- Just like to switch between programs press ALT + TAB , to switch between open Corel documents, press CTRL + ALT. If we have many open and we pass by, we can go back with Shift + CTRL + TAB . We can see the names of the open documents at the bottom of the window menu.

18.- We can quickly open the dialog box of the filling of a selected object by double clicking on its color sample of the status bar.

19.- Right dragging an object over another changes the cursor and when you open it opens a context menu in which we can move or copy an object, copy the properties of the source object in the target object, make a Powerclip or create a changing image.

20.- If we drag with the right button an object on the paper while we press CAPTIVATES , we change the fill properties of the new objects. If we press ALT , it changes the contour properties.

21.- To search for a color by its name in the color palette we click on a color while we press Shift . We get a window where we can write the number or the color name.

22.- If we hold a color of the color palette, we get a popup palette with percentages of ink. In the palettes of flat inks we have 10 levels and in the others we have 49. In these last the original color is the center.

23.- To select many nodes in irregular shapes that do not let us select them with a box, we can hold ALT and drag the shape tool to draw an irregular shape with freehand containing the nodes that we want. We can add individual selections or by means of a box if we hold down Shift .

24.- If we have a group of objects in which there are objects of artistic text, and we want to convert all text objects to curves, it is not necessary to make the selection of element in element: we can turn the group into curves and trace us all the curve elements.

Caution: it also converts curves to rectangles, ellipses, polygons …

25.- Edit powerclip: we have a keyboard shortcut to edit the contents of a powerclip: once selected, press CTRL and without releasing make a new click. The powerclip editing mode opens.

When we finish the modifications, press control and without letting click where there is nothing to finish the edition in this level, returning to the document.

26.- Curiosity: By pressing ALT once or twice we alternate between white cursor / black cursor. Useless? Maybe with some types of padding I find the cursor …

27.- Combine / Uncombine text: this trick is little known: With an artistic text object of several lines, we decompine ( CTRL + K ) and separate the lines, each as a text object. If we do it again, separate the words and if we do it again, separate the letters as different text elements.

To reassemble the text, combine ( CTRL + L ), but taking into account that we must select one by one and in order from the first letter to the last. The words and lines are also in order. This is because Corel remembers the original order in which the text was written and has the last word or written letter. That’s why it orders the other way around.

If it is a lot of text, it is faster to select everything, change the order (reverse order in the organize menu), and combine.

28.- Rounding rectangles:

With the form tool and a rectangle, clicking on a corner node, deselecting the other 3 and we can round that one.

29.- Variations of rotate and tilt. If we press CTRL + Shift , we can scale and rotate with the restricted angle. If we press ALT , we rotate and tilt at the same time and ALT + CTRL , rotate and tilt with controlled angle.

30.- To release a clone from its master object, we cut and paste the clone. Eye: if we cut and paste the teacher, the clones disappear.

31.- Double-clicking where the horizontal and vertical rules are joined is the origin of the rules in the lower left corner of the paper.

32.- We can simultaneously adjust the height and width of an object if we

press ALT and handle one of the corners of the selection frame. In this way we save ourselves to first adjust the height and then the width through the side panels of the selection frame.

33.- To reflect 100% an object on itself, without it moving, and in a single step without going through the menu of scalar and reflect, we pull a side handle of the selection frame while we press CTRL + CAPITAL , until exceed the center of the object.

This reflection without displacement is also obtained with the reflection buttons of the transform toolbar and in the properties bar (if not text).

If we want to reflect simultaneously in vertical and horizontal without

moving, we press CTRL + CAPITAL + ALT when stretching of a corner, but making sure to surpass the center of the object both vertically and horizontally.

If we continue to drag out of the object, it continues to increase by 100%.

34.- To quickly open the contour pen dialog box with a selected object, double-click the contour color swatch in the Status Bar. We can also press F12 .

35.- You can print all the keyboard shortcuts of Corel commands to consult the ones we use the most and can learn them. This is done from the Tools menu, options, workspace, customization, commands, shortcut keys, see all. We can sort them by command, table, pulse or description by clicking on the headers. It is advisable to print with the landscape paper or, if possible, in A3, on the large table.

Remember that keyboard shortcuts are customizable, and can be changed to others that are more accessible (for small hands), or easier to remember.

36.- You can edit the bitmap that you import to CorelDRAW simply by double clicking on the image. Photopaint is automatically opened for editing.

When you save after editing, changes are saved to the image that is embedded in the CDR.

37.- Change the color of the guide lines. At times we are working with many guide lines and almost dizzy more than help. To be able to classify them and to distinguish them better we can change the color to those that we want, individually. To change the color, select one or more guide lines and right click on the new color in the color palette.

38.- Guide lines, like all objects, can be locked

individually to avoid accidental movement. This option greatly improves the option to block the guideline layer, as it allows us to continue using and moving other guideline.

39.- If you want to place nodes equidistant in a curve, you can select a node that is not the first one of the curve and press “+” several times. Each time creates a new node in the center between the selected node and the next node (towards the first node of the curve). For example, in a two-node curve, we select the last one (the small one) and press +. As the new node is also selected, each new pulse adds a new node equidistant between the selected nodes.

40.- Easily close a curve. It is sometimes difficult to find the first node and the last of a curve to close it. To find the first node of a curve, select it, change to the form tool and press the home key on the keyboard. The first node is selected. To find the last node we would press End (End). But we just want to close the curve, we need to select the two, so we press Start, press and hold Shift and press End. We already have the two selected and there is only Join two nodes in the Toolbar of the tool form, or in the context menu of the right mouse button.

41.- You can give the option to adjust paragraph text to a paragraph text

, for example, to be able to comfortably put footnotes to images that already fit a text of paragraph and thus to avoid that the main text “mount” on the caption This function is not available for text, neither in the text properties bar nor in the context menu of the right mouse button, since normally, what we want to adjust is text to objects or photographs. We can create an icon of the function “adjust text” through the menu Tools, personalization, commands, choose the category of text, drag the icon to the desktop and we accept.

We will have a new toolbox. If we had previously selected the text tool, we can drag the icon directly to the properties toolbar of the text tool, which is where we need it, and there it will be when we want to make use of it.

42.- Create a mixture of two objects by tracing a stroke directly with the interactive mixing tool. We create the two objects that we want to mix. Select the tool interactive mix and whilewepress ALT draw the stroke between both objects. When the stroke is finished on the other object, the mixture is created.

43.- Quickly mix colors from the palette. After filling an object with color, we can mix that color with others to find the hue we need. Simply press CTRL and click on another color.

It will be mixed with the one with the object in 10% portions of ink. This can come in handy for, say, yellowing a green.

When cutting an object with the knife tool sometimes

we would like to see the shape of the cut without seeing the rest of the object trimmed, and even toggle between one or the other. When we are finishing the cut and before releasing the mouse, we can press TAB consecutively to see one part, the other or both. When we let go it will remain what is seen, automatically erasing the rest.

45.- When we drag from the rules we get guide lines parallel to the rule. We can pull them perpendicular if we pull them out while we press ALT.

46.- To alternate between lines and curves in the same stroke without drawing with the tool raised, we press a TAB and continue moving the cursor to place the next node. To continue with curves press TAB again.

47.- Delete the last stroke without drawing. When we draw with the raised hand tool and we want to undo the last stroke, we usually stop drawing and remove nodes with the tool shape. Then, without removing the selection, and with the tool raised, we continue drawing.

For if we want a little magic, instead of doing all that and without stopping to draw, we can press Shift and draw backwards until we reach the last part correct. It’s like deleting nodes as they pass over them. When we release capitals we can continue to draw.

48.- To zoom in on all objects press F4 or double click on the Zoom Tool.

49.- Double click on the tool selects all the nodes of the selected object.

50.- Double click with the tool form on a line creates a new node. Double click on a node, delete it.

When we want a floating window, like a toolbar, a color palette or property bar, to return to its coupled position, we double-click on the blue area of ​​the title. To make it float again we double click on the two lines at the end. Do you want to know who the Corel programmers are? The computer geniees and all the equipment that has created this program marvel? In Corel 10 you can know with this secret trick: you open the Help menu, About CorelDRAW, and a screen appears with the presentation image of CorelDRAW 10 and a few buttons to the side. You double click just above the W and … these are our heroes.

53.- This is very basic and should be at the beginning, but it is never late: double clicking on the shadow or the edge of the paper opens the page preparation dialog.

54.- Another classic: pressing the spacebar changes from the

current tool to the selection tool, or toggles between it and the previous tool, except with the text tool, in which it obviously creates a space.

To go to the selection tool from the text tool, you must press CTRL + Spacebar .

55.- To move the colors of the color palette, click on the triangle at the end. If we click with the right mouse button, an entire row is moved.

56.- An essential trick: press F8 while restarting Corel restores the values ​​of a new installation. This avoids many unnecessary reinstallations due to program failures and instabilities or unfortunate customizations. It is very useful when Corel does “weird things”.

57.- A headache for me has been how to solve that the same CMYK values ​​of a bitmap and those of a vector object are not identical, especially when they overlap, which is when it is most noticeable. For filming is not necessary, because it does well, but for printer, which is where we make our models to present the customer, it goes wrong. In Corel 10 I have solved it as follows: in the menu tools, color management, at the bottom, in style, select ” color management disabled” (I guess it will be color management off). On my Epson Stylus Color 1520 works perfect.

58.- Calibrate the rules of Corel so that our monitor shows real measurements when putting a Zoom of 1: 1. We will need a transparent plastic ruler. In the menu tools, options, workspace, toolbox, zoom tool, hand. There we have a button to calibrate rules. It works by relating measures of pixels with measures of centimeters.

We put the rule of plastic on the rules on screen and we are varying the value of pixels until it coincides with the rule, both vertically and horizontally. It is important that we have our eyes at the center of the screen. From now on we can use the 1: 1 zoom and see the actual size of things without printing them.

59.- why do not you keep the changes in the configuration of a document that we want to remain as predetermined? Because in the menu Tools, options (or faster CTRL + J ), in the documents section, we must activate “Save options for defaults for new documents” after making the changes, and activate those boxes of the fields that we have modified and we want them to be predetermined.

60.- To edit an object belonging to a group, press CTRL and select the object, even if the group is not selected. The selection box will consist of 8 circles instead of 8 squares.

61.- In principle you can not duplicate an object belonging to a group, because the command is not active, but if we move it and right-click (see trick 7) it can. The duplicate will also belong to the group.

62.- If we want to remove an object quickly from a group without ungrouping, we cut the object and re-paste it ( CTRL + X and CTRL + V ). It will remain in the same position, but outside the group.

63.- To modify a curve with the form tool, we can use the nodes, the knobs of the nodes or the curve itself. Each one acts differently and will be useful according to what we want.

64.- This trick is for those who have mice with wheels and who agree to click with it. When you do this, the cursor “sticks” to the scrollbar scroller and stays fixed in it until we click to release it.

With this function you only have to move the mouse without holding down to move us through the vertical scroll bar. This can be very useful in certain displacement actions to avoid the escape of the cursor by leaving the scroll bar while we move, such as when we do photo retouching. It also works with other programs.

65.- Redraw screen. On some occasions, especially when moving objects when zoomed in on part of the document, part of what was on the screen disappears, like a redraw failure. To correct it, press CTRL + W , which is to redraw the screen. Our drawing appears again complete.

66.- Complete toolbars with more functions. To put more functions that, by our work, we are interested to have in an existing toolbar, we click with the right mouse button on it and we mark Customize, Toolbar “name”, to add new command … Automatically sends us to the menu of command options, where we can select the one we want by looking in the list and dragging it to our toolbar.

67.- Transparent toolbars. Sometimes we need to have open many toolbars, the object manager, other dockable windows and we need to move them continuously to see our chart. These are the times when you wonder when you will buy that 25 “monitor. Meanwhile we have a “hidden” function that is to make the toolbars transparent. We find it, of course, in the customization options, where it says application. If we click “convert UI to transparent” there are more options: transparency degree, and what we want to make transparent (command bars, dockable windows …). Unfortunately, I’m afraid it only works with next-generation operating systems. (2000, XP …)

68.- We can modify the elements of the status bar by pressing ALT and moving the mouse: Dragging the item out of the status bar will delete it. By dragging we can also move an element to another position in the status bar. Stretching from the edges of the spaces they occupy, we increase their size horizontally to see more information. It would really be an extension of what I said in Trick 15.

69.- Importing an image with its original size and resolution is very simple if when the import square appears you make a single click – without drag – press Enter or space bar – the one I use for your convenience. If you click with the mouse and drag you are scaling the image and if you drag while you press ALT freely scales the height and the width of the image.

70.- We can easily color monochrome bitmap images (1 bit black and white). For this we select the image and color as if it were a vector object. Left button on a color palette gives the fill and right button gives the outline, only here instead of fill and outline we talk about the white area and the black or background and figure. If in our image we give any fill to the background, it will be transparent, without the need to use GIF format or alpha channel. We can do very interesting things with this effect.

71.- To enlarge / reduce a text frame and to enlarge / reduce the size of the typography, as in the artistic text, we press ALT while dragging the handle of a corner.

The last line of the text forced to full justification is sometimes very “rare”. To solve this defect we have a good option: ALT + 0160 adds a space, like when you press the space bar. What happens is that with this trick does push the last line. To avoid having to repeat ALT + 0160 until the text is put in place, we can do it 1 time and go back that space. Then we simply press the space bar as many times as necessary, because having a character behind it, it is considered as something and pushes, whereas only the space bar does not.

73.- To increase or decrease with keyboard the size of the text -art or paragraph-, instead of using the property bar and try 1 point more or a point less with several mouse clicks until you find the size that we want, we can select the text and while pressing CTRL , press the up arrow on the numeric keypad (8) to increase or the down arrow (2) to reduce.

Copy objects properties from the object manager without touching the drawing. It is not as powerful as a keyboard or mouse shortcut, but it can help those who use the layers a lot.

You select an object of the desired color in the object manager, just inside the same layer, and that is not inside a group, and while typing capital letters you drag with the right button on the object that you want to have the same properties . You get a contextual menu that allows you to do it. This menu does not come out any other way in the object manager.

75.- Separate the vuncated paragraph text frames so that each text frame is left with only the text they showed: You select all the linked text frames you want to separate and the short ones ( CTRL + X ) and then the new ( CTRL + V ). Copies of the frames have only the text they showed when they were linked and the link is lost. They are also in the same place if you have the position of duplicates at zero.

Inserting symbols into text strings can be as easy as pasting. Copies an object to the clipboard, for example a logo. Now type in artistic or paragraph text and paste ( CTRL + V ) as if you put one more letter. You paste the object stuck to the size of the letters. It also works with Shift + Insert. It’s a shame that you convert the original colors into CMYK.

77.- To quickly change the status bar from the lower position to the top, in addition to “right click on the status bar, customize, status bar, position” can be done with a double click on the bar status when no document is open.

78.- in the welcome screen that comes out when you open the program – if you have not disabled it, of course – you have to click on one of the options to enter the program. If you want to open a new document, which is the default option of that screen, pressing Enter will open it and you do not need to click.

79.- In trick 5 he commented that we can select objects that are behind others while we press ALT . When we work with line visualization and we have the option Consider as fill, something similar happens, but we can select objects without pressing ALT if we select them directly by the contour instead of by the center.

80.- Non-black bar codes. This is a problem that I have encountered occasionally and that although I wish it could be done directly with CorelDRAW it can not. The need arises when I want to create a label for 1 ink that is not black and the barcode does not change color and I get 2 colors in the separation. Knowing that bar codes need a high contrast with the background, this can not be done with any color but, to save that problem, to change color we export the bar code as CMX or AI (vector formats) and we return it to import into our CorelDRAW document. We will have a group of objects that we can change color. Be careful also with any modification, because now we could move a bar and alter the code !!

CORELDRAW TRICKS BAR CODES

81.- Copy the outline color of an object in the fill of another one or vice versa, only with the status bar. This is very useful when you are testing fill and outline colors. Although with the eyedropper and the bucket can be very useful, when it comes to contours you can pick up a fake sample. Try with a fine contour without getting too close to the zoom. From a black pantone outline can come out a gray CMYK.

The most accurate is to copy colors from the status bar. You select the source object, select the contour color sample from the status bar, and drag it to the target object. There, if you look at it, when passing through the contour the sample dragged changes briefly in case we want to copy the color to the contour, and if we loose on the filling, we fill with the color that we carry, just as if we had dragged a color from the palette.

82.- The default option of a powerclip is “blocking content to Powerclip” and changes in size or position of the object also affect the size or position of its content and that may not be what we want. To freely manage a powerclip object without affecting its content we must unlock the content and the option we have only when we right click on the object: we have to unselect “lock content to Powerclip”.

83.- It has happened to me sometimes that, working with CorelDraw, I delete all the objects on the screen and it seems that we have lost the job. Of course we do not dare to save and we go back to the previous version or we start again. I do not know exactly what the fault is, but if we save the document as it is, apparently in white, we close it and reopen it, everything appears in its place and we can continue working.

I think we have all gone before or after the happy change of language that causes us to work with Corel. We have been struggling to change the traditional Spanish by the international and back to begin – I the first. Yesterday it happened to me again and it took me two minutes to go back to English and unconfigure the entire keyboard. I could not leave it in Spanish anymore.

I have found in the windows control panel / regional settings / languages ​​a box that has solved the topic: hotkeys for languages, change sequence of keys, and not enable the sequence of keys. It turns out that the options of key sequences are:

CTRL + Shift

ALT left + Shift

Precisely these keyboard shortcuts can be used to the scale and Corel objects reflect, among others, or as part of key strokes, such as editing text with CTRL + Shift + T . As it is a Windows option, and we have assigned a sequence to it, as soon as it detects it executes the assigned order. As simple and annoying as that.

85.- To create many equidistant parallel lines to guide a page, the fastest way is to assign the position values ​​of duplicates to zero and the distance we want, draw a horizontal line of paper width and duplicate it. Instead of pressing CTRL + D again and again – which is the duplicate shortcut – we hold down CTRL + D and the page will fill at a high speed with equidistant lines. If we want to quad, we can do the same with the verticals.

86.- Blank files after a program failure. When Corel hangs and then we can not open or there is nothing in the document, we can try the following: Normally Corel saves a copy of your temporary C in somewhere that depends on whether you have a default temporary folder for Corel and operating system you use. Look for files with a CDR extension, whatever they are called, with a size similar to your file, inside the disk where Corel is installed. You may encounter a temporary called cor1.cdr. It is also possible to find a tmp called @@@@@ cdr.tmp or something similar that you can try importing to Coreldirectly or changing its extension by the CDR.