TopDown Flowcharter 4.0 includes the standard flowcharting features, such as multiple symbol palettes, a palette of ANSI symbols, custom symbol creation, custom line-styling, and multipage drawings. It’s what TopDown adds on top of the standard features that makes it a more productive tool.
TopDown allows you to quickly create a flowchart by doing many things automatically: drawing identically sized symbols wherever you click, joining symbols, routing connector lines, numbering symbols. If you’re brainstorming, StarBurst mode lets you automatically link subsidiary ideas or topics in a tree or hierarchy. Creating an organization chart is a breeze with this option enabled. You can, of course, always use the manual override for any automatic option.
Although flowcharts present processes and information graphically, documentation of a flowchart can also be an issue. To solve this problem, TopDown allows you to create a Notecard of up to 32,000 characters for each symbol used on a flowchart. In addition to printing each Notecard, TopDown can generate an outline report listing all symbols and their associated text, a cross-reference report listing each symbol and any symbols attached to it, and an error report listing symbols that have data coming in (an arrow points to the symbol) but no data coming out (there is no arrow pointing away from the symbol).
Kosiur, Dave. (July 1994). TopDown 4.0. Macworld. (pg. 77).