Microsoft's all-purpose diagramming tool has improved ease of use and stronger developer features in this new release. Visio is part of what Microsoft now calls the Office System. Standard word processing and spreadsheet applications have become commodity items, so Microsoft's rebranding puts the emphasis on other aspects such as team features, programmability and interoperability through XML. Visio is no exception. Having said that, a lot of effort has gone into enhancing the user interface in small but helpful ways, making it a worthwhile upgrade for any Visio user.

A Visio document mainly consists of shapes and connectors. Shapes are typically dragged from a palette called the Shapes Window, labelled, positioned and resized as required, and then connected to other shapes to show their relationships or their part in a flow of actions. A Visio shape is more than just a drawing object. Well-designed shapes are intelligent, and can only be modified in ways that make sense for what they represent.

Shapes can have custom properties and custom actions. For example, a Staircase shape in a building plan has a Number of Treads property and a Hide Handrails action.

In Visio 2003, shapes are easier to manipulate. As an illustration, in previous versions you rotated a shape by selecting a shape, then a rotation tool, and finally rotating the shape with the mouse. Shapes in Visio 2003 have a rotation handle, so you can select and rotate in one quick operation.

Other enhancements include support for digital ink on a Tablet PC and revamped online help integrated with the Task Pane. Team support is much improved in this version. A new review mode lets team members annotate diagrams and propose changes. You can also use a Sharepoint server to store drawings for team availability with features such as change notification.

Shapes are complex, and the usefulness of Visio depends largely on the supplied templates. Each template comes with its own set of shapes and documentation on how to use them. The templates range from simple flow charts to more specialised options like electrical diagrams, engineering drawings and network diagrams. Visio is a mature product, and there are hundreds of templates available. Most are familiar from previous versions, although many have new and enhanced shapes. If you do need to create shapes, the Visio SDK includes a new Shape Studio tool, although we haven't seen this yet.

This time round, Microsoft has tried to give Visio a greater appeal to business rather than technical users, so there are new business process templates for diagramming things like workflow, audits, SAP systems and fault-finding processes. There's also a new geographical mapping template, which lets you put together good-looking maps and routes. Web developers will be interested in the website template, which lets you generate a website map automatically simply by specifying an URL. In the beta under test, we found the results awkward to use and over-pessimistic with regard to broken links, but nevertheless the range of website shapes are valuable for designing a site outline, or for creating simplified diagrams that communicate a design to others.

One of the most interesting uses of Visio is as a component in a custom solution. Several new features make it more attractive to developers.

For a start, there is now a macro recorder. This is doubly useful, first for recording macros, and second as a way of generating code that shows how to program Visio's elaborate object model. The macro recorder does Visual Basic for Applications, but as with other Office System applications you can also write code in the .Net languages. Next, there is a new Visio ActiveX control that lets you embed and control Visio drawings within other applications, such as those created in Visual Basic or C#. Thirdly, database integration lets you hook up diagrams to dynamic data, or extract data from a Visio diagram. Finally, XML support lets you analyse Visio diagrams with XML tools, or hook into XML web services for dynamic drawings.

Visio XML is unfortunately rather complex, but still easier to work with than a binary format.

Contact: Microsoft
www.microsoft.com/office/visio

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