Extensis Portfolio 7

Extensis Portfolio 7

Manufacturer: Extensis
Retail Price: $199.95; Upgrade to Portfolio 8, $99.95

You might call me a Clip Art junkie. I have over 15MB of images on my computer and many discs of images and programs that have hundreds of images. Added to these are hundreds of my photographs and original artwork. It can get to be an overwhelming amount and an overwhelming problem of where to put all of these images and to catalog them into a logical, workable format.

Portfolio to the rescue!

The program that I am reviewing is Extensis Portfolio 7 and now that I have this program, Extensis has come out with Version 8. The web site has a very lengthy and interesting introduction of Version 8 from the viewpoint of a company using the program. I’m an individual with lots of graphics to get in order and Portfolio is just the program to do that.

The following is from the Quick Start Guide.

Here's what you can do with your copy of Portfolio Browser:

• Preview items without having to launch the programs
• that created them. Portfolio can open and preview most image formats, as well as QuickTime movies, audio files, Microsoft PowerPoint files, and many other types of documents.
• Search catalogs for specific items.
• Email copies of cataloged files from within Portfolio Browser.
• Make copies of cataloged files.
• View slideshows of cataloged images.
• View detailed information stored about each file.
• Customize how files are presented in Portfolio with a variety of predefined and customizable views - changing the look of your galleries.

Portfolio comes with manuals that seem to be a rarity in many programs today. Not only are there the 32-page Quick Start Guide, the 26-page Evaluation Guide and the 143-page User Guide, these guides also are part of the program so you can view them from your computer screen.

One of the most interesting aspects of Extensis Portfolio is Portfolio Express. This is a little program that you can use to open files and not have to open the whole program. Put an alias of Express on your desktop and you can open it and find thumbnails of a folder, or open the whole folder without going into the entire Portfolio program. I think this would be very useful for work groups. Figure 4 shows the Thumnail version.

Portfolio will catalog text files as well as graphic files so if you need to find a group of files without digging through many folders, Portfolio will do the job quickly with Express.

If you have lots of graphics, photos and files that you want organized in an easy to find format, Extensis Portfolio is for you.

Extensis Tutorials
The above URL will take you to a page where you can listen to and watch a lengthy video about how Portfolio 8 can be used in a large company.