A few years ago I saw a little program that was neat. It took a document and allowed you to make booklets out of it. I kind of lost track of the program and figured it went by the wayside. Imagine my surprise when I read a recent press release stating that a new version of this program was available. I decided that it would be a nice change of pace to check out this program once again. The name of the program is ClickBook 2000 and comes from Blue Squirrel.

ClickBook 2000 can print just about any file that was produced in a Windows based application. It can print web pages and documents. Print either single or double-sided documents. You can print a two-sided document without a special printer. You can print brochures, leaflets or greeting cards. You can customize and print sheets for your daily planner. And for you folks who are making up music CD's, ClickBook 2000 lets you print out song lists and covers for your jewel cases.

How does ClickBook work? It is a back-end product you use when an item is ready to be printed. It takes the place of an application's print command. ClickBook will print the item exactly as it was formatted in the program. The only difference is how you set up the item to have ClickBook print it. You will still have the margin settings, fonts and paragraph settings that the original item had. ClickBook just shrinks the item to fit on a page.

Some of the things that ClickBook does is shrink multiple pages onto a single sheet of paper or an oversized print job reduced down to printable proportions. It can set the pages of a document up so that when printed, they come out in the proper front-to-back, two-sided order. Set up extra gutter margins to allow you to bind a ClickBook document. There over 40 different layout options for you to choose from.

How simple is ClickBook to use? Just select the ClickBook printer setup when beginning your printing operation. This brings up the ClickBook program window. From this screen, select the Layout Wizard from the Layout pull-down menu. Choose the type of layout that will suit the job you want printed. Choose from print layouts like 4-up landscape, Daytimer pocket sized, 4-up flipbook and others. The wizard then takes you through the various formatting set-up that ClickBook needs to print your project. After the wizard has done its work, it's now up to you to print it out.

Blue Squirrel has a demo version of ClickBook 2000 that you can download from their web site. When you decide to buy the program the cost is extremely low. The full version cost of ClickBook 2000 is $ 49.95. The upgrade cost from an earlier version is $ 24.95.

I really liked this product the first time I saw it. It has been improved a lot since I first used it. If you want to make up booklets or have some custom printing needs look no further than ClickBook 2000.

You'll find ClickBook 2000 at the Blue Squirrel web site, www.clickbook.com.

Copyright © 2000 Bruce E. Von Stiers