Printing in Visio made easier

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 same easy-to-use print tab in the backstage view that made its debut in other Office applications in Office 2010, Visio now lets you print in the background so you can continue working while your diagram is printing. All this means fewer trips to the printer, less wasted paper, less time waiting, and more time doing what you love doing--creating awesome diagrams in Visio!

The Print tab

In the new Visio we have improved the printing experience by consolidating the settings and the preview in the backstage view. This simplifies printing, and in fewer clicks you can make changes to settings and see a live print preview.

The Print tab is divided into two panes, the settings pane on the left and the preview pane on the right. The printing experience is streamlined and simple--it lets you get to the most common actions more quickly, while retaining all of the printing power of Visio that you are used to.

The Print Settings pane

The settings pane on the left of the print pane allows you to print using the smart defaults, or quickly customize and set various printer settings before you print. The pane shows various galleries that include the current settings and options to modify them. These are printer settings you are probably familiar with, streamlined into a simpler interface. You can click on the big Print button to print your diagram if you are happy with the preview and with all your settings.

The Print Preview pane

The Print Preview pane is new to Visio, and we have already heard from early customers that they love the new experience. Here is the sample preview, with the Paper Size set to Envelope and the Orientation set to Portrait.  

In the Print Preview pane, you can:

• Pan across a diagram using the icon or the mouse left-click and drag.
• Switch across pages or zoom in or out from a diagram using the controls at the bottom of the preview pane.
• Pan and zoom to the page level by double-clicking any tile, then using Shift + arrow keys to move across the page.
• Fit the drawing to the preview pane by clicking to the right of the zoom control using the  icon.
• Toggle page breaks and see how pages will look by clicking to the left of the zoom control using the icon. This feature is unique to Visio among the Office applications, and it shows you how the pages will look when laid out next to each other.

Background printing

While the Print tab in the backstage view in the new Visio is all about the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) printing experience, the second big change in printing in the new Visio is all about giving you back time. Like its other Office counterparts, the new Visio now supports background printing - in fact it is the default.

So, you can now hit Print, and you will be brought back to your drawing canvas while your print-out is sent to the printer.

A few details on the printing in background experience:

• If you decide to close Visio after clicking Print, Visio will wait for the printout to be queued before exiting.
• Visio supports printing multiple diagrams in the background, and these are all sent to the printer, letting you focus on building those diagrams.
• Visio defaults to background printing, but automatically turns it off if you are on a device with limited memory.
• The status bar will display the status of jobs that are printing in the background.

Tell us what you think

In the new Visio, you can customize your most important print settings quickly, see these changes in real-time in the preview window, and then fire off that print-out and immediately get back to your work.

Take the new Visio printing experience out for a spin and write to us with any questions, comments or feedback!