Corel Show may just have come of age, in the version supplied with Corel Draw 4.0.  Where Move does animations, Show makes and runs slide shows computer-based slide shows.

Show itself is really a collection point and management program.  Actual images -- charts, word slides, sounds and so on, are created in the other Corel Draw modules.  These main creativity tools are accessed from the Show toolbar, or from the Insert menu.

The toolbar is a floater, like other Corel toolbars.  It has two areas:  The top four buttons control the object pointer, the Show object menu (also accessed using the right mouse button, as in Corel Draw), zooming and background selection.  The boxes below the blank "button" call the other Corel creative modules and also the OLE2 insertion function.

A problem comes up with object linking and embedding (OLE):  Though Show reports that it will embed objects from all programs listed in the Insertion flyout (represented by a variation on the old Windows logo, appropriately); this is not the case.  Only programs compliant with OLE2 will actually open, in our tests.  In the one case where it was possible to force the issue, and get a non-OLE2 object to insert (an .AVI file, using the enhanced Windows Media viewer), the clip would not play.

Moreover, there is an advantage to calling the insertion process from the menu rather than from the toolbar:  The menu call opens a dialogue box, from which it is possible to specify a file already created in the program being called.  Thus, if a company logo already exists in Corel Draw format (3.0 or 4.0 -- Corel 4.0 will do the conversion handily), it can be called and embedded.  This is distinctly preferable to doing any kind of extensive creation in a called program, it will be very sluggish.

Corel Shows can be saved and played elsewhere, using the SHOWRUN runtime program.  Put your show file and the runtime program on a disk and ship it around, or run it from a notebook computer (it had better be a fairly powerful one...).  The only downside we encountered at playback was an unpleasant inability to show the graded backgrounds effectively.  This seems to be an artifact of the way Corel handles taking over the display at runtime, in which case it will vary with the display system.  It looks as if the available palette is greatly constricted -- possibly to VGA levels. Test your system, in short.  If there is a problem, reducing the number of colors to be shown at any one time should improve matters.