Themes and Live Preview in Visio 2010

In Visio 2007, we introduced the Themes feature to make it easy to apply a professionally designed look to a diagram. In Visio 2010, the Themes feature gets a whole new user interface that takes advantage of the Office Fluent UI. The theme choices are displayed in a gallery on the Design tab in the…


SharePoint Conference 2009

The Visio team is anxiously preparing to introduce Visio Services to the world at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009, which runs from October 19th to 22nd, 2009 in Las Vegas. Visio Services is a new SharePoint feature that allows you to share Visio drawings across your organization in SharePoint. But it does more… If you’re…


Introducing Mr. Clarity

Harry Miller and Jonathan Foster in Office Content Publishing recently created a new educational video series called “Clarity,” whose aim is to encourage people to learn more about how to use Visio. (Note that these videos feature Visio 2007, rather than the newer Visio 2010 Community Tech Preview we have been discussing on the blog…


Creating custom validation rules for Visio 2010

In our last post, we discussed Diagram Validation—a new Visio 2010 feature which allows users to check their diagrams for common errors and allows companies to ensure that employees are following certain diagramming standards. In this post, we’ll talk more about how validation rules are stored and how to create custom validation rules. With Visio…


Diagram Validation in Visio 2010

Are all the shapes in my diagram labeled? Do I have any loose connectors that are not attached to other shapes? We have heard from customers that it is often hard to answer these types of questions, especially in large diagrams. As a result, they spend a lot of time manually checking diagrams for errors….


The Developer tab in Visio 2010

Visio has long had a setting called “developer mode” that developers and shape designers can enable in order to surface extra functionality. In previous versions of Visio, enabling developer mode made new items appear in couple of different menus (Chris Roth has a good overview here). With Visio 2010, we have taken advantage of our…


Cross-functional Flowcharts in Visio 2010

For flowcharts that have clearly defined stakeholders and assignments, cross-functional flowcharts are often used. Today, cross-functional flowcharts can span a whole conference room’s wall. The number of swimlanes can grow to five or even ten! At the beginning of the Visio 2010 planning, we heard from our users that it is hard for them to…


Details on Container Behaviors

In our previous post we introduced the Containers feature in Visio 2010 and demonstrated some of their basic capabilities.  In this post we’ll look at some additional behaviors of containers.  Display Order Typically in Visio the most recently added shape is shown on top of the other shapes on the page.  To change this display…


Organizing Diagrams with Containers

As the Visio product team began planning for the Visio 2010 release, we collected a lot of customer drawings.  Even though there were many different types of diagrams represented, we found some similarities.  We noticed that as diagrams got more complex, users added special shapes to help keep things organized and understandable.  Often users drew…


Improved Flowchart Routing in Visio 2010

When creating and maintaining flowcharts, a pain point users suffer from is ensuring that the connectors between shapes look good. Visio introduced the dynamic connector many releases ago to help simplify diagram maintenance. Dynamic connectors in combination with dynamic glue allow Visio to choose the sides of shapes to glue your connectors for the best…