Three focus areas for Visio 2010

Stephen Withers
Friday, 16 April 2010 09:16

Business IT - Technology

Microsoft has focused on three areas during the development of Visio 2010: ease of use, sharing data-driven diagrams, and BPM.

The focus of Visio 2010 is on ease of use, using SharePoint to share data-driven diagrams, and business process management.

Chris Crane, Microsoft's product manager for Visio told iTWire that the new Fluent user interface inherited from Office has been "very well received" by the half-million beta testers, with 90% of them seeing it as an improvement.

Other features making it easier and quicker to create diagrams include 'quick shapes' (a tooltip-like popup that adds a shape to the selected connection point on an existing shape), automatic document resizing to accommodate documents as they grow, the ability to drop a shape onto a connector in order to insert it between two existing shapes, automatic reconnection when a shape is deleted, and an 'auto align and space' tool to tidy up diagrams.

Visio 2010 also includes containers (groups of objects that are visually and logically treated as one) and subprocesses (multiple steps collapsed into one shape that's linked to a drawing showing the subprocess in full).

New features for data driven diagrams include the automatic generation of a legend (eg, when object colours reflect their current data values), and the ability to publish diagrams on SharePoint by using Visio Services.

What keeps the data live after publication? Find out on page 2.