How It All Began

We’re going to wrap up our look at Visio’s essential features with the most significant innovation of all – the SHAPE.   Essential Feature: Shapes A central concept in Visio is assembling a diagram from a pre-packaged set of content.  Users do not need to construct drawings from scratch using geometric primitives, nor do they…


Intelligent Diagrams

This is the sixth topic in a series discussing the essential features that make up the Visio application.   Essential Feature:  Extensibility Part of the original vision for Visio was that you could use it to make almost any kind of drawing.  Rather than focus on being just a flowcharting application or just a floor…


Retooling for Success

This is the fifth topic in a series discussing the essential features that make up the Visio application.   Essential Feature:  Drawing Tools Visio bills itself as a diagramming application, and Drag & Drop is the core feature that makes Visio easy to use.  However, Visio is also a pretty good drawing application and has…


Take a Closer Look

This is the fourth topic in a series discussing the essential features that make up the Visio application.   Essential Feature:  Zoom From business processes to project schedules to organization charts to network topologies, there are many different kinds of information that people and businesses use Visio to visualize.  But all these scenarios have one…


Gluing It All Together

This is the third topic in a series discussing the essential features that make up the Visio application.   Essential Feature:  Connectors The fundamental drawing type in Visio is the flowchart – a collection of boxes connected together by lines.  When Visio was first introduced, drawing programs mostly worked with geometric primitives.  Boxes and connectors…


What’s in a (File)Name?

This is the second topic in a series discussing the essential features that make up the Visio application.   Essential Feature:  Drawings, Stencils and Templates In the previous post on Drag and Drop, we mentioned that Stencils were separate documents from the drawing and thus Visio has to make a local copy of a master…


Drag, Drop, Done

We’re going to kick off the Visio Insights blog with a series on the essential features that make Visio the popular diagramming application it is today.  In each topic, we’ll cover the basics from a user’s perspective and then dive more deeply into the technical details.   Essential Feature:  Drag and Drop Fifteen years ago…


Greetings

Welcome to the Visio Insights web log, authored by members of the Visio Product Team.  Our goal is to give you some insights into how Visio works, how you can best use Visio to accomplish your tasks and how others are using Visio in their businesses.   You can expect to find topics covering a…