About Corel

Corel was founded by Michael Cowpland in 1985, who intended it to be a research laboratory ("Corel" is an abbreviation of "Cowpland Research Laboratory"). The company saw great success early in the high-tech boom of the nineties with the product CorelDraw, and became, for a time, the biggest software company in Canada. Corel made many early investors very wealthy, but its strong growth did not last. It attempted to compete with Microsoft after acquiring the WordPerfect software in 1996, but it failed badly. Corel was forced to lay-off large numbers of employees and Cowpland came under investigation by the Ontario Securities Commission for insider trading.

Corel products

• Corel Designer - Formerly Micrografx Designer, professional technical illustration software.
• CorelDRAW - A vector graphics editor. Still the company's best-selling software.
• CorelDream3D
• Corel Graphics Suite - Combination of CorelDRAW, PhotoPaint, R.A.V.E., Trace and Capture.
• Corel KnockOut - Professional image masking plug-in.
• Corel Painter - Formerly Fractal Painter. A program that emulates natural media (paint, crayons, brushes etc.)
• Paint Shop Pro - In October 2004, Corel purchased Jasc Software, developer of this budget-priced bitmap graphics editing program.
• Paradox - A relational database acquired from Borland and bundled with WordPerfect Office Professional Edition.
• Corel Photo Album - A sophisticated program for organizing digital photographs, inherited from Jasc Software.
  Corel PHOTO-PAINT - A bitmap graphics program comparable to Adobe Photoshop. Bundled with the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite.
• Corel SnapFire - A new digital photo management suite, positioned to compete with Google's Picasa offering.
• Corel Ventura - Desktop publishing software that had a large and loyal following for its DOS version when Corel acquired it in the early 1990s. It was briefly revived in 2002.
• Quattro Pro - A spreadsheet program acquired from Borland and bundled with WordPerfect Office.
• WordPerfect - A word processing program acquired from Novell, and originally produced by Satellite Software International.
• WinZip - A file archiver and compresser acquired in 2006 from Corel's purchase of WinZip Computing.
• iGrafx FlowCharter: Process mapping, modeling and diagramming software
• iGrafx Process: Process analysis, modeling and simulation software
• iGrafx Process for Six Sigma: Process analysis and simulation software for Six Sigma professionals
• iGrafx Process Central: Server software for centrally managing all process-related information
• iGrafx Enterprise Central & iGrafx Enterprise Modeler: Enterprise modeling solution for aligning company processes, resources, and systems with corporate goals and strategies.
• iGrafx IDEF0: Add-on environment for iGrafx product family for creating IDEF0 diagram