One of the first things you’ll notice when you start Visio 2010 is the new getting started screen, which is where you’ll choose a template for the diagram you plan to create. While it’s similar to the “Getting Started with Microsoft Office Visio” screen that greets users of Visio 2007, it’s actually part of the new Microsoft Office Backstage View that is common to all Office 2010 applications. The Backstage View is the location for features that interact with the...

Microsoft Visio 2010 is part of the Office 2010 wave of products. While Visio is sold separately from the applications in the Office suite, we share quite a bit of functionality with these applications. In Visio 2010 you will see the adoption of the Office Fluent User Interface and many other shared capabilities in Office. In the coming posts we will introduce the Visio 2010 features, showing where Visio is similar and where Visio is different from other Office apps. Every product development team...

This week Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft Project 2010 and Microsoft Visio 2010 have reached the technical preview engineering milestone. A limited number of invited participants can now download Visio 2010 to try it for themselves. This milestone also kicks off our coverage of Visio 2010 on the Visio Insights blog! Visio 2010 Overview Visio 2010 focuses on three major areas of investment: Ease of Use Visio 2010 incorporates the Office Fluent...

We’re excited to announce that the Visio team is taking nominations to participate in the Visio 2010 Technical Beta program! We will be sending out a limited number of invitations to download and install Visio 2010 Technical Preview in July. The team is excited to get valuable feedback and early testing from our community that will help us make this a great release. Here is your opportunity to nominate yourself to participate in the program (space is limited). If you’re interested, please...

A few updates… XMI Export We recently reported the availability of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Visio 2007. We received a few questions about how to use the XMI export feature in UML diagrams. The behavior in SP2 is exactly the same as in previous versions. Integrating it into the UML solution and retiring the separate download should make life easier for everyone, including us! The following VBA example demonstrates the interface: Application.Addons("UML Background Add-on").Run("/CMD=400 /XMIFILE...

Yesterday, we released Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Visio 2007. You can download and install it from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=78e36742-8bda-471e-88e6-9b561bb06258 Among the issues we've addressed in SP2 are these: A crash caused by early versions of the Broadcom “Send To Bluetooth” add-in occurs every time Visio is shut down. The first crash on exit will still occur, but subsequent crashes will not. The add-in will be disabled until it is...

T he Visio 2007 Viewer Developer Reference is up on MSDN and can be accessed at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc297217.aspx . The reference includes the full API reference and some short samples on how to embedded the viewer in different environments. The Viewer provides an application programming interface (API) that enables solution developers to perform the following tasks: Load and unload Visio drawings Select shapes Follow hyperlinks Display Viewer dialog boxes to the user Customize...

Visio 2007 provides data connectivity support for a number of data sources such as Excel, SQL and SharePoint Lists. One interesting scenario is to pull in schedule information from a SharePoint calendar (a special list type in SharePoint) to generate a Visio timeline. Visio MVP David Parker has posted an article that illustrates how to use Link Data to Shapes and the External Data window to bring in the SharePoint data and drop linked shapes onto a timeline. As David shows, the "secret" is to map...

For anyone who wasn't able to attend the Visio Conference 2008 this February or has been itching to show everyone else the cool things coming in Visio "vNext", the wait is over! Videos from all the conference sessions are posted on http://www.visiotoolbox.com . Click on the conference link in the bottom-right corner of the page - or follow the links below. Each session consists of the PowerPoint slide deck, speaker audio and video of the demos. Use the links below to jump to the sessions for each...

This situation has come up frequently enough in the newsgroups that the solution should be widely circulated: When Visio crashes, it will often restart and recover the document you were working on. This is generally quite helpful, but sometimes Visio doesn't know when to stop. Sometimes Visio will continue to recover that document and show it to you every time you launch Visio. This can be frustrating, but there is a solution. Close Visio. Then look in the folder " %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application...