When trying to select an area with the magic wand, lasso tool, or the selection rectangle with the Command key held down, the error message stating, "Sorry, that area is too complicated" may occur.
Explanation:
ClarisWorks and ClarisDraw use Quickdraw routines that are available through the Mac's operating system. The Macintosh operating system defines an element called a region. A region can be any arbitrary shape which can be described by combinations of pixels, lines, ovals, etc. The operating system stores the shape as a compressed collection of the individual scan lines (horizontal lines). One wide rectangle that is somewhat flat would be a small region. One tall rectangle, narrow or not, would be a larger region in the Macintosh scheme because it passes through several scan lines. Anyway, the Macintosh is limited to regions of no more than 32k of data. If you have created a picture and selected a large region with the magic wand or lasso (like trying to lasso a lot of light spray painting), you get the error described above. Applications like Photoshop work around this problem by not using Apple's provided QuickDraw utilities.
Workaround:
Reduce the total area that you're attempting to select at one time.