The new Visio pushes the boundaries of what org charts can look like and how easy it is to create them, by providing modern shape styles, automatic photo importing and a host of other improvements.

Let's jump in and explore how you can have more flexibility than ever in creating a professional, engaging and modern organization chart with the new Visio. 

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.

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.

Visio offers over 60 types of professional templates to build compelling diagrams, and organization charts are among most frequently created. Visio organization charts are simple and visual, but what if you want to connect them to key business indicators your organization is tracking, such as sales by region or department or budget by department, vacation status, training reports? Sometimes this information is located in another source such as Excel or  a complex database. Data-linked diagrams let you add data to Visio diagrams—no code required--and anyone in an organization can quickly create such dashboards to get better insights into data using Visio Professional 2013 or Visio Pro for Office 365.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.