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...

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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

One of the guiding principles for the Visio 2010 user interface is that commonly used shapes should be easily accessible. We showed how the Quick Shapes view in the Shapes Window aggregates the shapes from multiple stencils together. There are also common shapes that are useful in many different kinds of diagrams. These are exposed directly in the Ribbon through shape galleries. We looked at Containers and Backgrounds and Borders previously. In this post we examine Callouts. A callout is an annotation...

Visio has published the XML Schema Definition (XSD) files for the Microsoft Visio 2010 XML Drawing (.vdx) format. This schema is also known as DatadiagramML. The .XSD files allow developers to better understand the structure of Visio XML documents and design solutions that work with the .VDX file format. The DatadiagramML Schema for Visio 2010 consists of three .XSD files: visio.xsd is the core schema used by Visio 2003 and later visio12.xsd is the set of extensions used by Visio 2007 and later visio14...

Visio has long been the tool of choice for documenting processes. Ever since the introduction of workflow support in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, we have been hearing from customers, “wouldn’t it be great to visualize SharePoint workflows in Visio like flowcharts? Wouldn’t it also be great to go from Visio business process diagrams to executable workflows on SharePoint?” In Visio Premium 2010, we have partnered with the SharePoint Designer team to bring you that...