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.

...

Visio templates make it easy to build compelling diagrams that communicate visually. In this post, we’ll look at how to display information with data graphics. 

...

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

A challenge many users face when building diagrams is getting them to look neat and organized. Visio has included a number of features to help with the placement of shapes for many releases. Some of these are manual and only help when dragging a single shape. Others are automated but often a bit too rigid in forcing a layout style on shapes with no regard to how the user initially placed them. What if you could clean up a diagram with a few clicks, maybe just one, and preserve the work you have already...

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard maintained by the Object Management Group which gives businesses the ability to understand their business processes using a graphical notation and to communicate these processes in a uniform manner. The basic BPMN shapes are similar to traditional flowcharting shapes, which makes modeling in BPMN easy for new users. For advanced users, the BPMN standard contains a large number of detailed shapes—more specialized versions of the basic shapes—which...

As the Visio product team began planning for the Visio 2010 release, we collected a lot of customer drawings. Even though there were many different types of diagrams represented, we found some similarities. We noticed that as diagrams got more complex, users added special shapes to help keep things organized and understandable. Often users drew boxes around clusters of shapes to define a logical grouping. That got us thinking whether we could help with this kind of organization, and the Containers...

In a previous blog post , we told you about the new Connectivity APIs in Visio 2010 that make it easier for developers to create and to move across a connected diagram. We’ve shown you how to use some of the new APIs to create new connected shapes ( see here ); now we’ll examine techniques for traversing connected diagrams. One of the most useful APIs for analyzing a connected diagram is the Shape.ConnectedShapes method, which allows you to get a reference to the shapes connected to a...