The Visio team has signed off on the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) build of the new Visio. On behalf of the team, I'd like to thank all of the users of the Customer Preview—your great feedback helped us fix bugs and refine new features. Please keep the feedback coming!

The new Visio will be available at the same time as the other Microsoft Office applications. You can find additional details, including availability information, on the Office News blog.

Thanks,
The Visio Team

Lots of customers have told us that they want to exchange one shape with another without losing the text, connections and formatting.  The Change Shape feature in the new Visio gives you this functionality. In this post, we will review the Change Shape feature and talk about the implications of the feature on shape and solution developers.

With the new Visio you can quickly create modern looking, organized timelines that make it easy to order events and share information. Improvements we made across the product allow the new timelines to take on a variety of different looks to create beautiful, professional diagrams. Specifically, we made it easier to do the following tasks: apply themes, customize dates and elements, reposition shapes and switch between timeline styles

This blog post will walk through making a timeline to highlight the new features and demonstrate a few tricks and hints.

The new Visio start experience is all about helping you quickly and easily find the template you need to begin your diagramming experience. You'll see that we've updated all our template icons to be simpler and easier to quickly scan.   We've also color coded them, so that, for example, all the flowchart related templates are green. Additionally, new search functionality will make it easy to find exactly what you're looking for to get started creating your diagram.

Ultimately, we think these improvements will make it a lot faster to go from booting Visio to drawing your diagram. 

In a previous post, we showed you some of the rich shape effects that are now possible in the new Visio. These effects are great not only for adding visual impact and vibrancy to shapes, but also for presenting shape data in new and interesting ways.

The new Visio has a variety of improvements designed to make your diagramming experience easier and more fluid. Below is a list of 10 new ways you can be more efficient in the new Visio. Give them a try the next time you create a diagram and see how much time you save.

In a previous blog post, we introduced the new themes, variants, and styles feature in the new Visio. Not only does this feature make it easy and fast for users to create professional looking diagrams, it also fully supports programmatic access. This post will focus on how to use the new API methods to apply modern and vibrant looks to any diagram.

The new Visio offers a number of new capabilities - the modern look of the app, new themes and shapes for making professional-looking diagrams, new ways to collaborate with multiple authors and reviewers. We've also made it much easier to share those diagrams with your coworkers and friends - even if they don't have Visio. That's where Visio Services comes in. Visio Services lets you share great-looking diagrams using SharePoint or O365 with up to the minute data.

Our previous posts have discussed some of the great end user features we’ve added to the new Visio. For developers, the new Visio supports programmatic access for many of its new features. The new Visio API contains methods that let developers change shapes and pictures, add comments, duplicate pages, and apply themes.

In this blog post, we will introduce some of the new API by providing brief descriptions about the methods, properties, and objects. We will also see some of them in action using examples.

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.