Microsoft Visio
Description
General purpose business diagramming program ideally suited to developing complex flow charts, process diagrams and network diagrams. Available in several compatible versions: Standard, Professional, Technical and Enterprise. Each version uses the same diagramming interface but provides different templates and stencils for creating a wide variety of diagrams.
Strengths
- Relatively simple to learn and use
- Utilises "templates" that allow predefined page layouts, scales and other formatting features to be saved and used as the basis for new diagrams. New templates can be created if required
- Utilises "stencils". Each stencil contains a number of drawing objects used in a specific type of diagram such as process boxes, flow chart symbols and building elements (walls, doors, windows etc.). New stencils and new drawing objects can be created if required. A template can be saved with one or more stencils built in.
- Powerful connectors between drawing objects. The connectors remain attached to objects as they are moved around, making it relatively painless to update diagrams
- Good (and no doubt, improving) integration with Microsoft Office products (Visio Corporation was acquired by Microsoft at the start of 2000)
- Excellent "Save as HTML" feature with built-in hyperlink capabilities
- Ability to create custom forms for recording information about drawing objects. Reports can then be produced to list selected information
- Supports macros and Visual Basic (VBA) automation
- Each diagram page has a "foreground" and a "background". The background can be shared between several diagram pages to provide standard features such as headers/footers, background colour etc.
- Named layers can be created on a diagram. Drawing objects can then be allocated to specific layers. This provides the ability to print, hide or edit objects on one or many layers - useful for building services or any diagram where one type of information is of interest at a time.