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