Visio has a depth and variety to templates that you will miss if you only use the Basic Shapes or Blocks stencils. For an overview and samples of diagram types, go to the Help menu and click on the Diagram Gallery option (in Visio 2003).
This handy gallery describes all the templates in Visio, gives examples of the resulting diagrams, and in some cases provides larger views of the sample diagram. In addition to providing a decent sample of the drawings created by the Visio template, the Gallery gives context for how the diagram type may be used. This is what makes the Gallery valuable. The samples themselves are illustrative of diagram types, and will typically represent a part of a diagram or a simple complete diagram.
I can read up on a Cause and Effect diagram (it’s a fishbone drawing), and extrapolate that if bank managers can use it to troubleshoot international money wiring problems, I can use it to analyze how late specs impact development schedules. I can check out the description of the Workflow diagram template and learn that it offers lots of people shapes to document physical workflow process as well as informational processes.
If I’ve never heard of the Brainstorming diagram type and I check out the Diagram Gallery, I not only see an example of what a Brainstorm diagram might look like, but I can read a couple of scenarios of where generating a Brainstorming diagram might come in handy.
In this example, I can even click on the diagram example and get a larger view of the brainstorming diagram.
There’s usually at least one larger view of the sample diagram in each category. Just click the smaller image of the sample Visio diagram; a larger image might load in another browser window. For example, the Project schedule category has larger views of a Calendar diagram type and a Timeline diagram type. The Web diagram category demonstrates both a conceptual Web site diagram, as well as a Web site map. The Network category has several different sample diagrams, including this nifty Visio sample of a rack.
If you are looking for an visual introduction to Visio diagrams, check out the Diagram Gallery on the Help menu.
-- Mai-lan
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