Visio Blog

Data-linked diagrams: Building data graphics

Mark Sargeant — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:00:00 GMT

Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team.

Visio templates make it easy to build compelling diagrams that communicate visually. Organization charts are among the most popular templates, and you can enhance them to create a data-linked diagram that connects to key business indicators in your organization and then link your data from an external source so that the information is always up to date. In this post, we’ll look at how to display this information with data graphics.

Let’s focus on budget attainment and use a color by value data graphic. To do this, click the Data tab, then select Data Graphics, or select the shape, right-click to select Data, then click Edit Data Graphics. We’ll create a new data graphic with color by value as the type.

Now we can apply the value to all the shapes on the page. Highlight the shapes you’d like to associate with your data graphic, then select Apply to All Shapes.

Once that’s done, you’ll have the following organization chart – pretty nifty, for sure.

We need a legend to indicate what the colors represent, and Visio makes it easy to add one to your diagram. On the Data tab, select Insert Legend, and then you’ll see a key that explains what the colors mean.

You can move the legend around to where you’d like on the page, and you can also delete or modify individual elements in it.

We can quickly see how the team is tracking against budget spending, and sharing your diagram on SharePoint via Visio Services helps you to effectively communicate this simple and intuitive dashboard to others. And the best part is that as the data gets updated in the spreadsheet, we can refresh our Visio diagram. On the Data tab, click Refresh, or you can also set up an automatic refresh with up to 1 minute frequency.

Note: Data-linked diagrams are a feature of Visio Professional 2013 and Visio Pro for Office 365 and are not available in Visio Standard 2013. Although data-linked diagrams may be opened in Visio Standard 2013, they will not be updated, and diagram changes may impact data connections on the page.

–Yana Terukhova, Product Marketing Manager

Data-linked diagrams: Linking data from an external data source

Mark Sargeant — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:00:00 GMT

Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team.

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.

Linking data to Visio diagrams was first introduced in 2007 and has been overwhelmingly popular. We’ve improved the functionality since then and the capability has become increasingly more powerful. Associating data with shapes on a diagram does not require any code. There’s a simple wizard which guides you through linking your data source to your diagram. Once you’ve linked data to diagram shapes, apply data graphics to shapes--text, data bars, icons, or color by value conditional formatting--to visually display numerical data. The important point here is that data-linked diagrams are dynamic; the data graphics change when data is refreshed in the source (like Excel).

To get started, we created a simple organization chart in Visio. We’ve chosen the coin layout for this example. Once we have added the data, we can change the layout to better match the data format. As you can see, we have name, title, and photos for each of the members in our organization.

You can imagine that all types of data that be visualized--from vacation status/training completion, to number of documents in a particular step in a process, and to percent budget attained. Options are vast.

Before you add any data to a diagram, it is a good idea to decide exactly what data you want to see, because this will define which data visualization format best fits your needs.

A common task in organizations of all sizes is to track budget and spending, either by department or at the budget owner level. Let’s see how we can use Visio to show how each person is doing against their budget.

In this example, we will display revenue attainment, budget, and number of employees reporting to certain people. Here is the current view of our data in Excel.

Using this file as the data source, you could also link it directly to real-time budget information in a back office system (such as Microsoft Dynamics and other data sources).

It is important to remember that your data needs to be consistently arranged in the source, so Visio can understand all the logic behind it. For example, keep rows filled with consistent data and name all the columns in a consistent manner. Very often, when data is not displaying appropriately in a Visio data-linked diagram, there is a problem with how this data was originally organized in the source.

There are two steps to link data in Visio:

Import the data source into Visio. This creates the link between your Visio file and the data source, but does not link any of the shapes to that data.

Now we can see that the Excel and Visio files are linked together.
Link shapes to data. Once the data is associated with your diagram, you can associate individual rows in the data with shapes on the page (a single row may be associated with multiple shapes, such as visualizing multiple dimensions of data). Data can be associated by dragging individual rows from the shape data window or by automatically linking (if you have columns that correspond to shape data elements).

We linked automatically in this example, and Visio quickly associated all the shapes by unique names of each person in the chart.

You may be surprised by the result--there are text links to the right of the shapes. This is the default data graphic as text. Now we can change and add data graphics to the diagram to make it look exactly as we want it.

–Yana Terukhova, Product Marketing Manager

Webinar: Get started with Visio

Doug Thomas — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:55:00 GMT

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.

Can't view this video? It's also available at Microsoft Showcase.

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
How to connect shapes
How to work with text in Visio

References for this webinar

Learn more and try Visio 2013 for free
Basic tasks in Visio (article)
What's new with Visio 2013 (video)
Home page for Visio 2010 and other editions
Geographic Map Shapes for Microsoft Visio (download)
Shapes I: Introductory basics you can't live without (training course)
Shapes II: Expertly position, stack, and group shapes (training course)
Shapes III: Let's talk about text (training course)
Shapes IV: Let's talk about text positioning (training course)

Go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information on how to join the series.

--Doug Thomas

Data-linked diagrams: Creating a diagram

Mark Sargeant — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 01:15:00 GMT

Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team.

Visio offers over 60 types of professional templates to build compelling diagrams, and organization charts are among most the frequently created. Visio organization charts are simple and visual, but what if you want to connect them to key business indicators tracked by your organization, such as sales by region, budget by department, vacation status, or training progress? Sometimes this information is located in another source, like Excel or a complex database. Data-linked diagrams let you add data to Visio diagrams--no code required--and anyone in an organization can quickly create such dashboards to get better insights into data using Visio Professional 2013 or Visio Pro for Office 365.

Build an organization chart from Excel data

We’ll start with an organization chart diagram like this one.

The data you add to the organization diagram can be in an Excel file, populated from Exchange/Active Directory, or constructed manually by dragging shapes on a page.

Tip: if you pull data from Active Directory or Exchange, you must have Outlook installed and configured with an active profile--the requirement is a MAPI connection. Visio uses MAPI to get data, so if you don’t have one, the data import will fail.

In this example, the Excel file has three columns: Name, Title and Reports To. Visio uses this information to determine how to organize the reporting relationships in your organization chart.

From the Visio start screen, select or search for Organization Chart.

Once the wizard starts, select Information that’s already stored in a file or database. Then you can tell Visio what columns have your hierarchy information and where to import pictures from, if you have them.

You can specify a folder with your pictures, and as long as there is a field that Visio can match to (such as Name). Visio will automatically associate them with the correct organization chart shape.

Once you’re finished, you’ll have an organization chart that looks like this:

Change the design of a diagram

Now you can click the Org Chart tab on the ribbon and make changes to reflect what you’re looking for, including spacing and other variants.

In this case, we used the Coin design to add a splash of color:

Although this example focuses on mapping departments of people, you can use the Organization Chart Wizard to map all sorts of hierarchical data--a website map, for example--as long as you can clearly format that data in Excel.

–Yana Terukhova, Product Marketing Manager

Business Process Modeling with Visio at the Gartner BPM Summit

Mark Sargeant — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:00:00 GMT

Krishna Mamidipaka is a Senior Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team.

Microsoft Visio is one of the most widely used tools for Business Process Modeling (BPM) projects worldwide, and people use Visio for a variety of tasks within the context of their BPM projects. From creating process flows that are validated for critical compliance needs to automating human and document centric workflows, and monitoring these workflows, Microsoft Visio supports BPM efforts of varying complexity.

The new Microsoft Visio, powered by interoperability with Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365, provides a strong social, mobile and cloud-based infrastructure for BPM initiatives. In addition to the newer workflows and collaboration features, it also offers several new diagram templates that support the latest industry standards, such as BPMN 2.0 and UML 2.4.

Look for us at the Gartner BPM Summit April 2-4, 2013 as we take our very compelling and well-recognized BPM story to the Washington D.C. area. Microsoft is a Platinum sponsor of the summit, and we are very excited to speak with a variety of customers, partners, analysts and press while at the event. Do join us if you can!

Learn more about new and improved BPM capabilities in Visio with our Microsoft BPM Whitepaper.

–Krishna Mamidipaka, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Recapping posts on the new Visio

Mark Sargeant — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 14:30:00 GMT

written by Aftab Alam

Over the last few months, we’ve been posting about the new Visio – discussing features in depth and introducing the editions that will be available. Before we get started on a new series of posts, we thought it would be helpful to summarize our existing content – while the material was written for the Visio Customer Preview, it applies to the released version well. Also, we'd love to hear you response in the comments -- whether there are posts you absolutely love, certain topics you'd like to hear more about, or just how much you're thrilled with the new Visio!

We’ve loosely organized the posts in a few areas, but most span multiple topics, so please take our categorization as only a starting point:

New and updated content

Ease of use

Workflows, BPMN, Database and UML

Versions and availability

Developers

Introducing the new Visio website

Visio Team — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:00:00 GMT

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 simultaneously.

One piece of feedback we've heard loudly and clearly recently is that it would be great to have a single place to find out information about the new Visio.

And, here it is: the new Visio website - your single source for information about the new Visio, including top features, edition descriptions, and information on how to purchase.

Visio is also now available as an additional product in the Office 365 family. Visio Pro for Office 365 delivers the same features as Visio Professional as a subscription and is available to purchase as part of Office 365.

We would like to thank our customers, partners, and Most Valuable Professionals for the feedback received during the product development process, which greatly contributed to a strong Visio release. Please keep the feedback coming - the Visio team welcomes and reviews all your comments! Subscribe to our RSS feed in your favorite reader (such as Outlook) to be notified of new posts.

10 tips for developers working with the Visio VSDX file format

Stephanie Horn — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:00:00 GMT

The new Visio introduces a new XML-based file format, VSDX. In a previous post, we provided an overview of the new file format. One benefit of the new file format is its interoperability: it is now much easier to work with the default file format outside of Visio. In this post, we provide some tips for working with the new file format programmatically.

...(read more)

Printing in Visio made easier

Arun Rajappa — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 01:30:00 GMT

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!

The new Visio editions

Ian Mikutel — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 13:45:00 GMT

The new Visio will have three editions: Microsoft Visio Standard 2013, Microsoft Visio Professional 2013 and Microsoft Visio Pro for Office 365.

Which Visio edition is right for you?

Many of the improvements and new features in the new Visio are available across all editions, but Visio Professional and Visio Pro for Office 365 contain some additional functionality when compared to Visio Standard.

Microsoft Visio Standard 2013 is designed for people looking for a powerful diagraming platform with a rich set of built-in stencils. It helps simplify complex information through simple and easy-to-understand diagrams. Visio Standard includes stencils for business diagrams, organization charts, basic flowcharts and general multi-purpose diagrams.

Microsoft Visio Professional 2013 makes it easier than ever for individuals and teams to create and share professional, versatile diagrams that simplify complex information. It includes all of the functionality of Visio Standard 2013 as well as updated shapes and templates; enhanced support for team collaboration, including the ability for several people to work on a single diagram at the same time; and the ability to link diagrams to data. Visio Professional 2013 includes all of the rich stencils in Visio Standard 2013, and adds additional stencils for business and engineering diagrams, process diagrams (including BPMN 2.0), maps and floor plans, network diagrams, and software and database diagrams.

Microsoft Visio Pro for Office 365, available as a subscription through Microsoft Office 365, includes the same features, stencils and shapes as in Visio Professional 2013. In addition, it allows each user to install Visio on up to five PCs running Windows 7 or Windows 8. It also adds Visio on Demand, which lets users temporarily install Visio on kiosk computers, and it automatically installs the latest feature and security updates for the duration of the subscription.

The main functionality differences between the three editions are summarized in the table below. As always, if you have any questions about the differences between the new Visio editions, please let us know in the comments below.

--Ian Mikutel, Program Manager, Visio Team