Before downloading OpenOffice I read some reviews of the various components. Most of them faired well except for Draw. It really got hammered by several people. I was almost afraid to even use it.
So I open it up and...wow...it's a piece of cake to use. The connectors are far smarter than the ones in Visio and it's much easier to line items up. The grid spacing is actually reasonable as opposed to MS where at times you think there is a grid but often you are just not sure b/c the snap is terrible.
I created an entire static structure for my app in about an hour. The same would have taken 2 hours in Visio. I find I have to fight too many automatic 'features' in Visio just to get my diagrams to look right. Now to be fair Visio has far more symbols and UML support which is characteristic of a MS product. But OpenOffice Draw with more UML and symbol support would be very close to Visio.
Anyone used these two before? I'd like to hear what some of you have to say about these two products. I cannot figure out why Draw received such bad reviews from people.