It's easy to create beautiful, professional diagrams in Visio, but what if you need to print your drawings to review during a meeting or display as a poster? The new Visio provides a cleaner, quicker, and more streamlined printing experience. Along with the easy-to-use print tab in the backstage view, Visio now lets you print in the background so you can continue working while your diagram is printing. Read on to learn more about faster, simpler printing.

The new Visio will have three editions: Microsoft Visio Standard 2013, Microsoft Visio Professional 2013 and Microsoft Visio Pro for Office 365. Learn which edition of Visio is right for you.

The Microsoft Visio Viewer is a free download that lets anyone view Visio drawings without having Visio installed on their computer. If you have Visio, you can still benefit from the viewer because it allows you to preview drawings in both Outlook and the Windows Preview pane. We recommend that everyone with Windows 7 or Windows 8 download the latest viewer to get the best experience viewing drawings.

In this post, we explain the Microsoft Visio Viewer in more detail.

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.

The Visio team is here at SharePoint Conference (SPC) 2012, and we're looking forward to having an exciting and fun-filled time in sunny Las Vegas.  A major theme of SPC 2012 is our new release of Office--including SharePoint, Project, and Visio--and we've got a full agenda of topics to cover.

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.

With the power of Click-to-Run, Visio on Demand, Identity and Roaming, your new Visio will let you get to work quicker and in more places than ever before. Now you can worry less about installations and configuring settings, and more about creating awesome diagrams. Read on to learn more.

Containers are a convenient way to visually group your shapes together and then easily work with that group. Callouts provide a simple mechanism to attach text to a shape. We’ve improved both in the new Visio. Specifically, there are more shapes to give you increased flexibility to express your information. We also updated our old and new shapes with themes, so you have many choices for customizing the look and feel of your diagram to your audience. Lastly, we streamlined the insert menus and the heading styles menu to make it easier to find, select and customize the shape you want.

Database templates have a fresh, modern look in the new Visio. In our new approach, templates focus on the on-canvas experience, which makes them great for brainstorming, free-form diagramming and collaborating on ideas.

There are  four database templates:  Chen's, Crow's Foot, IDEF1X and UML. Each template can be used to model a database system in a different notation. We'll describe the components of a database diagram and then cover each of the notations.

In the new Visio, we have re-envisioned our Unified Modeling Language (UML) templates in a fresh, modern way.  We updated our five most popular UML diagrams, with all new shapes to make it easier and faster to create beautiful, professional diagrams. Our new UML templates allow you to create class, sequence, state machine, activity and use case diagrams that match the UML 2.4 standard.  The templates focus on a freeform, on-canvas experience. Each template takes advantage of the full capabilities of Visio, including shape effects and themes, as well as collaboration and commenting to share your diagrams across your organization. In this article we'll introduce each of the new UML diagrams and present a few tips about using the new model.