Introduction

Visio has been around since 1992, delighting office workers everywhere by enabling them to easily incorporate insightful business diagrams and drawings into their daily work.

Every day, millions of Visio users create illustrative org charts, block diagrams, flowcharts, process flows, and network diagrams. And thanks to foresight by the original designers, they even create scaled drawings such as space plans, office plans, site plans, network rack elevations, and the like.

Some users enhance their diagrams with data, hyperlinks, and even custom add-ins. They publish these diagrams to internal or external web or SharePoint sites and create departmental tools out of diagrams. The breadth of disciplines touched by Visio diagrams, and the depths to which users create Visio solutions, is astonishing and inspiring.

Visio 2010 ups the ante with one of the biggest upgrades ever. It’s full of goodies like the new, friendly Ribbon user interface; lots of process-diagramming enhancements for making connecting, arranging, and aligning easier; juicy live previews that show you how your changes will look before you make them; enhanced CAD interoperability, improved data-visualization features; and some really cool tools for adding structure to your diagrams.

If you compare today’s Internet and computing world to that of 10 or 15 years ago, you’ll notice an explosion in graphics. Not only has the expectation of quality graphics grown, but the staggering amount of data that we have at our fingertips necessitates the use of pictures to understand it. Indeed data visualization has not only become a buzz word but also a serious career path.

Amidst all this, Visio occupies a curious position. It’s not a “fancy grapher” that can create interactive animated web-based spiraling data visualizations that dance to lounge music. Its foremost function is creating connected diagrams and scaled 2D drawings, which are data visualizations of a different kind and have plenty of utility and value by themselves.

But because elements in Visio drawings can be linked to data and that data can be visually highlighted within Visio, it also has a place on the modern data visualization stage. If you imagine displaying alert icons on overloaded servers in a network diagram, highlighting office space that is underused or overpriced in red, or simply showing informational text that can quickly be gleaned by users, you literally get the picture.

At any rate, the importance of visual communication is growing, and Visio can be a big part of the very visual future.

How This Book Is Organized

My goal in writing this book was to demonstrate the essentials of Visio diagramming, highlight labor-saving shortcuts, expose the quirks, and hint at advanced techniques for those aspiring to be power users.

Visio’s visual nature makes it easy to figure out a lot of the basics, but its long history (including eight years of life before being acquired by Microsoft!) and astonishing breadth and depth have resulted in a few less-than-obvious features, a few oddities, and hidden power.

Luckily, Using Visio 2010 comes with web-hosted companion videos, which I think are particularly important and helpful for a graphics application—seemingly long and complicated sets of step-by-step instructions can suddenly become clear as day after watching a video!

Visio 2010 comes in three editions, Standard, Pro, and Premium. Although most of this book focuses on the things you can do with Visio 2010 Standard, Chapters 7, “Working with Data,” 8, “Tips for Creating Specific Types of Diagrams,” and 10, “Sharing, Publishing, and Exporting,” do touch on a few features available only in Pro and Premium. I’ve tried to make it as clear as possible which features are available only in certain editions.

With Using Visio 2010 you will learn how to

• Efficiently assemble connected drawings such as flowcharts, org charts, and network diagrams from premade libraries of shapes and manage the connection, layout, and arrange the shapes in those diagrams.

• Manage, search, and create shape libraries, plus incorporate graphics from external sources in your diagrams.

• Organize, annotate, and add structure to your diagrams using containers, callouts, multiple pages, backgrounds, titles, and layers.

• Find, recognize, and utilize all of the special features that make Visio shapes SmartShapes that are superior to clipart.

• Incorporate data into your diagrams, report on the data, link to external sources, and add visualizations based on that data.

• Control your output by printing in a multitude of ways, including reduction, enlargement, and printing to large-format paper.

• Share your diagrams in numerous ways, including e-mailing, exporting to PDF and other formats, and publishing to the web and to SharePoint sites.

• Program very basic Visio SmartShapes and write simple macro code to automate Visio programmatically.

Using This Book

This book allows you to customize your own learning experience. The step-by-step instructions in the book give you a solid foundation in using Microsoft Visio 2010, while rich and varied online content, including video tutorials and audio sidebars, provide the following:

• Demonstrations of step-by-step tasks covered in the book

• Additional tips or information on a topic

• Practical advice and suggestions

• Direction for more advanced tasks not covered in the book

Here’s a quick look at a few structural features designed to help you get the most out of this book.

• Chapter objective: At the beginning of each chapter is a brief summary of topics addressed in that chapter. This objective enables you to quickly see what is covered in the chapter.

• Notes: Notes provide additional commentary or explanation that doesn’t fit neatly into the surrounding text. Notes give detailed explanations of how something works, alternative ways of performing a task, and other tidbits to get you on your way.

• Tips: This element gives you shortcuts, workarounds, and ways to avoid pitfalls.

Special Features

More than just a book, your USING product integrates step-by-step video tutorials and valuable audio sidebars delivered through the Free Web Edition that comes with every USING book. For the price of the book, you get online access anywhere with a web connection—no books to carry, content is updated as the technology changes, and the benefit of video and audio learning.

About the USING Web Edition

The Web Edition of every USING book is powered by Safari Books Online, allowing you to access the video tutorials and valuable audio sidebars. Plus, you can search the contents of the book, highlight text, and attach a note to that text, print your notes and highlights in a custom summary, and cut and paste directly from Safari Books Online.

To register this product and gain access to the Free Web Edition and the audio and video files, go to quepublishing.com/using.