Our customers say they spend a lot of time coordinating and communicating with coworkers to get their daily work done. Whether you’re working on a simple illustration or a flowchart documenting an extremely complex process, it’s not uncommon to have to go through multiple revisions, get feedback and work with others to get the details right. That’s why we picked collaboration as an area of focus for the new Visio. In this post, we'll tell you how to collaborate more effectively using the new Visio.

Visio users tend to do one of two things after creating their diagram--share it or present it to others. Both of these scenarios require your diagram to look visually appealing. So, unsurprisingly, one piece of feedback users continually told us was that they wanted to make professional and modern looking diagrams.

This week, we'll give you an overview of the changes we've made to Visio templates and shapes--what we call "content". Ultimately, when you combine Visio's new features with new content, it's easier than ever to produce professional and modern diagrams.

As we started working on the new version of Visio, we heard from you that it should be super-easy and fast to create professional looking diagrams in Visio. To help achieve this goal, we redesigned our themes, and created new formatting options and effects that can be quickly accessed using themes. Each theme also comes with four unique variants, giving you more flexibility to fine-tune your diagrams. If you want even more control, a set of styles is provided for each theme, allowing you to format any individual shape, using professionally designed styles and colors.

Visio 2003, 2007 and 2010 all had the same primary Visio Drawing (VSD) file format. For most users, this was great: files could be shared easily between these three versions of Visio. There were, however, some drawbacks. Most notably, the primary format was binary, which limited both the information stored in the file and how easily IT professionals and developers could work with it.

For the new Visio, we introduced an XML-based file format to provide new capabilities in Visio and improve interoperability with other applications. Other benefits of the new file format include a single unified format for end users and developers, smaller file sizes and reduced security concerns. This post provides an overview of our new file format.

When we started our planning process for this version of Visio, we made it a central goal that it would be easier, faster and more pleasant to create beautiful, professional looking diagrams. To achieve that, we made a host of improvements to the application - far too many for us to cover here. So, for this post, I'll aim to give you an overview of all the changes we made and cover a few of the most highly requested new features. Later posts will cover everything here in much more detail.

Developers and IT professionals frequently use Visio to design and document software and database systems. They recognize the benefits of visualizing complex systems to understand relationships and dependencies, and Visio makes it easy to communicate and socialize designs across the team. As a result the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Database diagrams in Visio are widely used today by an enthusiastic audience, and our developer and IT community provide invaluable feedback on these diagram types. We have addressed this feedback in the new Visio with a significant refresh of the UML and Database templates. 

The first time you open Visio you’ll see that it has a new look. The workspace is simpler, cleaner and designed to make sure your diagrams are the most noticeable and important part of the page. The changes go deeper than just the look, though, and this article will go over some of the most noteworthy improvements.

If you don’t yet have the Visio Preview, you can find instructions for getting the preview here so that you can try the changes in Visio out for yourself.

Visualizing processes is at the heart of Visio’s DNA and in Visio 2010 we took a big step forward in that area by including support for SharePoint workflows. This lets users create a workflow in Visio, import it into SharePoint Designer, and make it an executable workflow on SharePoint.  In the new Visio we’ve added SharePoint 2013 workflows and made SharePoint Designer an even more integral part of creating workflows visually.

Learn about Visio--designed to help you make great diagrams faster--and preview the latest version. See how Visio creates flowcharts, room layouts, timelines, organizational charts and a lot more.

Click read more below to view entire webinar or watch the trailer now:

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar:

• What Visio does for you
• New themes, effects & styles

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a standard maintained by the Object Management Group that allows businesses to document and communicate business processes uniformly using graphical notation.

The new version of Visio supports BPMN 2.0, which is the current version of the standard, and corresponding Diagram Validation rules. Using these rules, a user can check the visual correctness of a diagram against logical rules specified in the standard. This article explains more about our new BPMN 2.0 support.