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ALLCLEAR 4.0 – Diagrams with Less Fuss

Visual communication continues its steady march toward displacing plain old blocks of text that dominate the practice of law. Pictures are cropping up more and more often in briefs and correspondence. Lawyers use tables, graphs and diagrams not only in courtrooms, but now also in presentations to colleagues and in "auditions" before prospective clients.

When it comes to running a law office or law department, attorneys and administrators are less inclined to hire specialized talent or devote their own time to fussing with the creation of diagrams and charts. The rather plain visual aids that can be produced with a word processor or spreadsheet may be the all that is used internally. Anyone who has spent too much time with a computer graphics program trying to eliminate obvious visual glitches knows it can be hard to produce a decent diagram.

Enter allClear 4.0 from SPSS, Inc., 444 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60611, 312-329-2400, www.spss.com. This product does an especially good job of creating and modifying flowcharts and organizational charts. It automatically takes care of drawing all the boxes and lines. You focus on the logic and substance of what you want to communicate in a diagram or organizational chart. These visual aids can be invaluable when meeting with partners, administrators and staff to formulate and communicate changes in how workgroups are organized and how works flows.

A flowchart is a powerful tool for identifying missing steps and unnecessary steps in any sequence of related events. With pencil and paper, most people could quickly sketch out a messy series of known tasks, then draw in some lines for shortcuts and branches for dealing with alternatives. While this approach of writing on restaurant napkins is a time-honored American method of brainstorming, to communicate good ideas to other people you need a better looking visual medium.

AllClear’s unique approaches allow you to type in a series of tasks in the form of a list. A few simple punctuation marks control how the tasks are linked to each other. As you enter the text, allClear draws the diagram in a neighboring window. Here is an example of an allClear flowchart:

For the complete flowchart, click on the above diagram. (95 KB; 30 sec. download time at 28.8)

This diagram was automatically produced from an allClear outline typed in by the author. The outline is created with a word processor-like screen. A person creating an allClear chart can rely strictly on punctuation (period to end a step, question mark for a yes/no question, colon for multiple choice) or can click on a generous set of buttons. Here is how the outline looks:

allClear 4.0 Outline Screen

For processing with more steps, allClear continues the diagram onto multiple pages. It automatically handles the page breaks and produces output that makes sense as separate pages or that can be taped together into a larger sheet.

AllClear has one aesthetic drawback. [Note: SPSS reports that this drawback has been fixed in a service release for allClear, version 4.01.] Often it draws lines that have more right angles than are needed and that cut in between boxes rather than skirting around them. The diagrams are always readable, but these minor aesthetic flaws detract from the final product. The diagram author can manually reroute the lines, but that can defeat one of allClear’s strengths: its ability to immediately redraw the diagram whenever a new step is added or and old one removed. The automatic redrawing overrides the manual tweaks to a diagram’s appearance.

If your office is interested in moving to a more visual approach to communication, allClear 4.0 could an effective tool for you. For $395, you can eliminate a lot of the time that people would need to spend fussing with competing products to make their work look right. Viewer software is free, so that diagrams can be distributed to everyone’s computer at no additional cost.

Ó Copyright 1998 Wells Anderson

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