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Visio Standard 5.0isio Standard 5.0

A minor upgrade to an excellent diagramming tool

Product: Visio Standard 5.0
Features: An intuitive and powerful package for creating and publishing business diagrams. Can be heavily customized with Visual Basic for Applications.
Price: Rs 9,450
Summary: An easy way to create project timeline diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and publish them on the Web. Has powerful report generating features, and integrates well with commonly used Office suites.
Vendor: Datapro Infoworld, 113/1 Koregaon Park, Pune 411001.
Fax: 212-634813 Tel: 638975, 630326

Visio Standard 5.0 is a minor upgrade to the 4.5 version we reviewed in the November issue. The upgrade concentrates more on enhancing existing tools than on adding any significant new features. There are several new graphics import filters and new smartshapes. The standard version now ships with Visual Basic for Applications for creating custom solutions (such as enhanced autoshapes), a feature previously only available with the Technical and Professional versions.

For the uninitiated, Visio is a high quality, easy to use illustration package ideal for creating most business and technical diagrams. Beware, Visio is not a drafting or a drawing package. It uses a series of pre-constructed "shapes" that you can quickly assemble together to produce accurate and professional diagrams such as floor plans, network diagrams, project timelines, and other commonly used illustrations such as workflow diagrams.

Visio’s drawing screen consists of a number of open "stencils" that contain related "smartshapes". If, for example, you were creating a standard project timeline diagram, you would have a stencil containing most common shapes such as 1D and 2D arrows, task boxes, and the like.

Network diagram stencils have smartshapes of servers, cabling, printers, modems, routers, and desktops. You can simply drag and drop each shape onto the active drawing sheet and link them using the several tools available. Visio has several features that assist in connecting shapes such as Autosnap and linking features. The link feature, for example, will keep two objects connected even if you move them around on the page.

Smartshapes contain an attached "property sheet", essentially a database of its properties that define its behavior. A property sheet holds the shape’s geometry, the various relationships that constrain its geometry, as well as custom properties such as price. For example, walls cannot be given any random thickness, but only industry standard specifications. These property sheets are extremely powerful as they can be used to generate reports based on any specified criteria.

Visio also allows you to create excellent Web diagrams. Each object on a page can be defined as a link to another object (such as an expanded view of a sub part). Using the HTML export filters then produces an HTML page consisting of an image mapped JPEG, GIF, or PNG image with links defined to all other drawings defined on the page.

New with Visio 5.0 is the ODMA (Open Document Management Architecture) feature, which provides version tracking, control and access monitoring through third party add-ons.

The one crib about this package is to do with its undo feature. I had hoped this feature would be taken care of with version 5, but it’s still unhelpful and does not allow you to undo anything but the simplest of changes in your document. Worse still, any action which is non-reversible (as most are), makes you lose the ability to undo anything previous to that.

Overall, changes have been minor (worthy of a Version 4.6 perhaps), but it’s a more satisfying and intuitive package to work with than before.

Nikhil Datta at PCQ Labs