As mentioned in the last post, Visio 2010 has reached the Release to Manufacturing milestone. The product team has spent the last several months incorporating your feedback from the Beta and refining the product. A large community of customers, partners, and MVPs has contributed to this effort. More than 500,000 people have downloaded the Visio 2010 Beta release, and the feedback has been very positive. People have commented on the blog, sent e-mail, submitted Send-A-Smile reports, logged crash reports, and contacted Product Support to provide feedback on the product.
This post describes some of the more visible changes you will find between Beta and RTM. Overall very little is different in the user interface for RTM. The bulk of the work has been targeted at improving reliability (fixing bugs), performance, and security.
Including all 6 drawing tools on the Home tab
Quite a few people commented on the reduced set of drawing tools on the Home tab as compared with the Drawing Tools toolbar in previous releases. Users of the Beta did not know or did not want to go to the Developer tab for the complete set of tools. You can find all six tools on the Home tab for RTM.
Entry point to Line dialog from Line dropdown menu
At the bottom of the Fill and Shadow dropdown menus in the Home tab are commands to open a formatting dialog for more properties. A similar command is missing for the Line dropdown menu in the Beta. This command has been added for RTM for better consistency across the formatting features.
Changes to Save to SharePoint user interface
There are a number of small changes in the Backstage view to make saving files to SharePoint more understandable. First the name of the tab for publishing and sharing files has changed from “Share” to “Save & Send”. Then in the Save to SharePoint place, the option for selecting whether to publish as a Drawing (*.vsd) or Web Drawing (*.vdw) has changed from “Save Drawing As” to “File Types”. Finally the command button has changed from “Save to SharePoint” to “Save As”. The intent is to use familiar terms to describe the actions for saving a document. Also “Save As” makes it clearer that the command will present the Save As dialog to confirm all the settings before saving.
Formatting overrides are preserved when pasting a shape into a themed document
If you apply formatting to a shape (e.g., fill color or pattern) and then copy it to a different page in a themed document, the formatting will be preserved as long as the theme on the destination page is the same as on the source page.
Support for context menu customization through RibbonX
RibbonX is the extensibility framework for the Office Fluent UI. RibbonX provides customization of the Ribbon, the Backstage view, and context menus. Visio 2010 Beta did not support context menu customization, but support has been added for RTM for most of Visio’s context menus. More information on RibbonX extensibility in Office 2010 is available in this blog post.
Summary
These are the more visible changes for Visio 2010 RTM from the Beta. There are many more improvements behind the scenes to make Visio 2010 a fast, secure, and reliable release. Thank you for all the Beta feedback. We hope you will try out the final version of Visio 2010 as it becomes available in the coming weeks. Please continue to let us know what you think or want to hear more about.