New Users Guide
As you might have noticed, there is a critical shortage of good books on Xara available! In fact, there are no books on Xara available. So with this appalling fact in mind, I will attempt to cover some of the Xara basics. We'll begin with a quick tour of Xara's workspace and then work our way down the main tool bar. 

a. The main toolbar. b. The standard Windows menus. c. New Page, New Animation, Open, Save buttons. d. Context sensitive Infobar, changes to reflect available options for a selected tool. e. The animation functions. These are grayed out because we are in a drawing page, Xara's default. f. The galleries: Color, Layers, Bitmaps, Lines, Text, Clip Art and Fill. g. The screen palette. The diamond shaped colors are web-safe colors.

Most of Xara's toolbars can be un-docked by dragging a portion of the border around the tool bar (not an icon) onto the page. The toolbar can then be stretched by dragging the sides when the cursor turns into a two-sided arrow. Dragging the toolbar back to the sides of the page will dock the toolbar.

NOTE: If you click the X button the toolbar disappears from the page. Should this happen, go to the Window pull-down menu and select Control Bars... and add a check for the toolbars you want to use.