One of the many tools you’ll find in the new Visio to help you make your diagrams look modern and professionally designed is the addition of shape effects. If you’ve used effects like shadow or reflection in PowerPoint you’re already familiar with how effects can add visual impact to a shape. In the new Visio we have added those same shape effects to allow you to make engaging and professional diagrams simply. In this post, we'll describe how to work with the new effects in Visio.

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.

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.

Last week Microsoft announced that the customer preview of the new Microsoft Office is available for the public to download. At the same time, we released a preview of the new Microsoft Visio, which allows you to try out the new Visio and use all of the improvements for yourself. We’re very excited to share the new Visio with you and will use this Blog to explain new Visio features and improvements.

In this post, we wanted to give you a brief introduction into what you’ll see in the Visio Preview.

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 this post, Tucker Hatfield, a Program Manager on the Visio team, shows you how to give us feedback by sending a smile or frown. This same feature is available in all Office Preview products.

Now that the Visio Preview is available, we want to hear what you have to say. You can let us know how you use Visio, what's most useful to you, what you like, and what changes you'd like to see. A big part of what will make the Visio Preview successful is the feedback we'll get from you, so help us make Visio better by sharing your thoughts through the Send-a-Smile feature.

We've appreciated the reception of the new Visio, including the great feedback from early adopters around the ease of use improvements and the ability to work as a team on a single diagram at the same time. 

For those looking for a single place to find out information about the new Visio, please read on to learn more about the new Visio website.

Learn about Visio, a program designed to help you make diagrams for flowcharts, room layouts, timelines, organizational charts and a lot more. We’ll start at the key of Visio: understanding how its shapes work.

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar

• How to get shapes, either from the Visio program or by downloading them
• The difference between 1-D shapes and 2-D shapes...

Visually displaying always up-to-date information on clearly laid out diagrams helps to communicate information effectively. In this post, we will see how to connect data from external sources to a diagram. Associating data with shapes on a diagram does not require any code. Learn how to use the simple wizard which guides you through linking your data source to 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.