ActiveWin.Com: Microsoft Visio Premium 2010

In mid-2010 Microsoft upgraded their Office productivity suite along with their family of products, which include Microsoft Visio and Project. Microsoft Visio is the company’s industry leading business diagramming solution for organizing information into variety diagram types. In this review, we take a look at the new version, its features and capabilities.

Microsoft Visio is now available in 3 editions, prior versions were available as Standard and Professional, the latest addition is Premium.

Microsoft Visio 2010 uses the familiar Office 2010 setup experience, just insert the disk, launch setup, enter your product key, accept the End User License Agreement and Visio 2010 will be installed in a few minutes.

Just like fellow Office 2010 siblings (Project, InfoPath, Publisher, SharePoint WorkSpace and SharePoint Designer), Visio 2010 adopts the Ribbon interface first introduced in Office 2007. Starting Visio 2010 for the first time, you are greeted by the Back Stage interface which takes you immediately to the Templates Gallery where you can choose to start from a Basic Flowchart diagram or one of the many installed templates or what’s available on Office.com. The Visio’s default interface is organized into several parts, the familiar stencil Taskpane is still there, along with 5 new Tabs that host options formerly hidden under drop down menus. These Tabs include Home, Insert, Design, Data, Process, Review and View. There’s also a tab for Developer and associated software/database developer/architect features. Similarly, when a customer downloads a 3rd-party or a Microsoft add-in, the Visio client creates an Add-In tab where the supplemental functionality can be accessed and configured.

http://visiotoolbox.com/2010/add-ins.aspx

In addition to the new Ribbon User Experience, Visio also adds a new shapes window, redesigned in Visio 2010 to make it easier to find and use shapes when creating diagrams. These enhancements focus on making it easier to move from the initial "creation" phase to the "editing" phase of working with shapes.

You can easily navigate between stencils by using the list view at the top of the window. This makes it easier to find and select the stencils you want and eliminates the problem of losing track of stencils, which were stacked at both the top and bottom of the Shapes Window in past releases. To open new stencils, you simply click on the "More Shapes" menu to choose from a wide variety of stencils.

With live rendering, shapes are now drawn as they will appear when dropped on the Visio canvas, with the current theme applied in full-color. This provides a more accurate preview of a shape's appearance before you select it for use in a diagram.

You can customize the order of shapes by simply dragging the icons to a new position in the stencil. By doing so, you can easily access the shapes you use most frequently together in one place. Modifications are persisted and will appear the next time you use the stencil.

Quick Shapes represent a subset of shapes that are more commonly used within a given stencil. The faint horizontal divider line shown in each open stencil indicates the division between Quick Shapes (above divider) and non-Quick Shapes (below divider). You can choose your own Quick Shapes by dragging the icon of a shape above the divider line.

You can also click on the new "Quick Shapes" view which generates a stencil showing all the Quick Shapes across your open stencils. This makes it easy to use common shapes across multiple stencils without having to switch between them.

You can also collapse the Shapes Window, by toggling the small arrow on the top right of the window. This provides more screen space when working with large diagrams or on small monitors. The collapsed view can show all the shapes in the current stencil or just the shapes in the Quick Shapes view. The collapsed view is fully functional with the ability to drag and drop shapes.

Live Rendering replaces a shape’s icon with an image of what the shape actually will look like on the page. You can see the full color spectrum used in the gradient fills. You can see the anti-aliasing applied to the geometry and text. If there is currently a theme applied to the page, Visio will even show the shape with the theme applied. What you see is what you get.

Live Rendering is also available for any of your own custom shapes. Visio 2010 takes the existing setting for automatically generating icons for shapes and repurposes it as a setting for Live Rendering. If you right-click on one of your own shapes in the Shapes Window and choose Edit Master > Master Properties, you can see the revised property.

Of course, Live Rendering may not be the best option for every shape. Perhaps you prefer the icon to be more of an abstraction than a realistic portrayal of the shape. Sometimes the shape has so much detail that it is not understandable in 32x32 pixels. Maybe the shape is oblong and does not scale down to a 1:1 aspect ratio well. In these cases it is best to stick with the shape icon, which is still limited to 16 colors in order to maintain file compatibility with previous releases.

Sometimes only a portion of a shape is visually distinct from other shapes in the same stencil. There is always a possibility that shapes found in the same stencil are likely related, so they may share some common visual attributes. In these cases the distinction may be too small to be useful when displaying the shapes as icons. To ease this problem, Live Rendering supports custom crop regions. Instead of rendering the full extents of a shape and shrinking that to icon size, Visio can render a specific region of a shape and use that for the icon.

The biggest change with copy/paste is that if you copy shapes from one page and paste them to another, the shapes will paste to exactly the same location as on the first page. In prior versions of Visio, the shapes would always paste to the center of the window. This change makes it easier to make an identical copy of a page or to create a multi-page document that has minor changes between pages. For example, you might have a series of flowcharts that begin with the same set of steps or a storyboard that walks through a UI design.

If you want the pasted shapes to go to a certain location on a page, rather than to the position they were copied from, you can right-click on the page at the location you want them to be placed, and choose “Paste” in the right-mouse menu.

Improvements been made to page tabs to make them easier to use and more consistent similar to the sheet tabs in Microsoft Excel. There is a new Insert Page button at the end of the page tabs, so you can quickly add a series of pages to the end of the page tab order.

If you right-click on a page tab and choose Insert Page, the new page is inserted immediately after the page tab you right-clicked on, rather than at the end of the tab order. So you can insert the page where you want it, rather than having to add the new page at the end before dragging it to the desired location.

Since the settings in the Page Setup dialog box apply to the currently active page, the Visio Team added the Page Setup command to the page tab’s right-mouse menu to provide quick access to that page’s settings.

Pages in Visio can be either foreground or background pages. Foreground pages are the pages you build your diagram on. Background pages have special behaviors and are intended as a place to put objects that you want to appear on multiple foreground pages. To help you distinguish between background and foreground pages, the names on background page tabs are italicized as a hint that they are different.

Right-clicking on the forward/backward navigation buttons to the left of the page tabs brings up a menu of all of the pages in the document, so you can move quickly from one page to another.

If you want to make all the pages in your document the same orientation or size, you can apply the same setting to all of them at once, instead of having to set it for one page at a time. Click on the Orientation or Size buttons on the Design tab in the ribbon, and then right-click on the setting you want in the menu. Choose to apply it to all the pages in your document or only the current page.

The theme choices are displayed in a gallery on the Design tab in the ribbon. An improvement over Visio 2007 is that you can apply both theme colors and effects with one click on a thumbnail in the main Themes gallery, instead of having to visit two separate task panes. Each thumbnail is a pairing of a color scheme from the Colors gallery and an effect scheme from the Effects gallery.

Just like Visio 2007, the color schemes include colors for text, fills, lines, connectors, shadows, and backgrounds, as well as a collection of five accent colors. The effect schemes include the font used in text, as well as formatting for the fills, lines, connectors, and shadows.

If none of the theme pairs in the main gallery are to your liking, you can choose from any of the schemes in the Colors or Effects galleries, which are located next to the main gallery.

Just like Visio 2007, you can also click “Create New Theme Colors” or “Create New Theme Effects” at the bottom of the gallery to create your own custom theme.

Themes show off the capabilities of Live Preview in the Office Fluent UI. When you move the cursor over each thumbnail in the gallery, the theme’s formatting is previewed on your diagram. This lets you sample on the flye with various looks without the need to commit the change. If you don’t click on anything, the diagram reverts back to whatever was applied before the preview.

Live Preview is available for many other galleries and menus in Visio 2010. Another feature that makes good use of it is the Containers feature discussed in an earlier post. When you move the cursor over the various container designs in the Container gallery on the Insert tab, the container style is previewed on the selected shapes so you can see what it would look like if applied.

Visio 2010 introduces a new way to apply a background or border and title design to your diagrams. The new Backgrounds and Borders & Titles galleries on the Design tab in the ribbon let you choose from a variety of styles and apply them with one click.

For several versions, Visio has provided a way to apply a background design to diagrams using shapes that you drag out from the Backgrounds stencil that opens with many of the templates. In Visio 2010, you can do this by clicking on a preview thumbnail in the Backgrounds gallery.

AutoConnect was a feature first introduced in Visio 2007. The original intent of the feature was to simplify the creation of connected diagrams such as business process flowcharts by accomplishing multiple tasks in a single action:

3. Aligning and spacing the new shape attractively with other shapes in the diagram.

The notable efficiency is that AutoConnect accomplishes these tasks without the need to switch to the Connector tool (and subsequently back to the Pointer tool).

Visio 2010 improves AutoConnect to make the creation of connected diagrams even more efficient. Here’s a summary of the new features:

In many ways, AutoConnect’s core ability of adding new connected shapes works much the same as it did in Visio 2007 – with one very significant enhancement in Visio 2010. AutoConnect now allows you to choose from up to four Quick Shapes from the current stencil as the added shape.

Note: Quick Shapes represent a subset of shapes that are more commonly used within a given stencil.

Visio 2010 adds a dynamic page sizing capability that responds as you draw, so you no longer have to manually adjust your page size to your diagram. As you draw beyond the edge of the current page, Visio expands the page in that direction by one additional tile, or printer paper sheet.

If you live preview adding a shape with AutoConnect, Visio also previews the tiles that will be added. As you drag shapes outside the current page or drag shapes from the Shapes window, Visio shows a translucent preview of the new tiles that will be added if the shape is dropped in its current location.

All sorts of things can affect the size of your diagram when printed, including adding shapes, deleting shapes, moving shapes, adding or removing text and changing text properties. Any of these will alert Visio to update the page larger or smaller to keep the drawing within full tiles.

Visio 2010 adds a dynamic page sizing capability that responds as you draw, so you no longer have to manually adjust your page size to your diagram.As you draw beyond the edge of the current page, Visio expands the page in that direction by one additional tile, or printer paper sheet.

Visio 2010 adds the ability to insert a legend that documents the data bars, icon sets and color by values in data graphics applied to shapes on the page. You can do this using the Insert Legend button on the Data tab.

Visio creates the legend at the upper right corner of the page. The legend contains a separate section for each data field referenced in the data graphics’ definitions. The descriptions for each legend item are obtained from the data graphics.

The legend is customizable, so you can add, remove and rename sections and shapes to make the legend look just right for your particular diagram. Legends also pick up the theme applied to the page, or they can be manually formatted.

The legend is made up of a number of shapes and uses containers to keep the different parts of the legend organized. The top-most shape is a list, a special type of container that arranges its members in a regular, linear pattern. The members of that list are containers, each of which represents a data field from the data graphics. Inside each container is another list, this one invisible, which keeps the individual legend items neatly arranged.

You can select a legend item and use the arrow keys on your keyboard to reorder them, or you can drag them around the list. You can also drag them out, delete them or drag your own shapes in. The same can be done with the containers that correspond to each data field. If you click the blue insert arrow on the outer list, Visio adds an empty container for your own use. While this will not have the inner list, you are free to add any shapes you wish.

It’s easier to align and space shapes to make your diagrams look neat and organized.

The Dynamic Grid is turned on by default for most diagram templates. You can turn it on or off by toggling the checkbox in the View tab.

To see the Dynamic Grid in action, simply drop a shape next to another shape and notice the orange lines that automatically appear.

The Dynamic Grid also displays orange line segments when evenly spaced shapes are found close to each other. This is useful for easily placing shapes in equal distances from one another. Simply drop a shape next to other evenly spaced shapes to see these line segments in action.

When either an alignment or spacing relationship is found between shapes, Visio will gently snap the shape you have selected to an invisible grid. This snapping behavior makes it easy to grab a shape using the mouse and position it next to other shapes.

To help position shapes within a page, the Dynamic Grid also supports margins around pages. You can snap to page margins by simply dragging a shape towards the top, bottom, left or right margins of a page. If the page is completely empty, you can also snap to the center of the page.

To help position shapes within a container, the Dynamic Grid also supports container margins and centerlines. You can snap to containers, such as swimlanes, by simply dragging a shape around the container margin or in the center of the container.

Visio 2010 offer UI shapes for building dialogs, controls, and toolbars. What’s new however is the addition of common UI icons for Windows, web, and multimedia applications.

Customizing wireframe UI components are easier than ever. Most Wireframe shapes are resizable and offer options to customize the visuals.

Unlike previous Windows XP UI shapes, the new Wireframe shapes also allow users to customize the look of the UI elements through Themes or formatting. With Themes, users can easily customize color and effects schemes that can be applied to all UI components easily. Moreover, individual controls can be formatted to indicate highlight or indicate different UI states.

With the introduction of Containers, Wireframe shapes such as Dialog form, Application form, and Panel are built as Containers to “contain” any control that is placed inside it. By being a Container, when you move a Dialog form, all controls contained inside it will also move with it.

Also, Wireframe controls such as Tree Control, Drop-down Menus, List Box are shapes to utilize the new list feature, similar to Cross-functional Flowcharts and Data Graphic Legends. Lists allow users to easily add new element to be contained in a List shape through a blue arrow, as demonstrated below in a Drop-down Menu control:

As a result, users no longer need to add shapes through multiple drag-drop or copy-paste operations. Instead, the blue arrow allows for a super quick way to add a lot of UI components while properly aligning and arranging the items at the same time.

When you apply a background, Visio creates a background page (named “VBackground-1”, if it’s the first one), drops the background shape on it, and assigns it to the foreground page.

If you right-click on the preview thumbnail in the Backgrounds gallery, you can choose to apply it to all the pages in the document or just the current page.

Once the background page is created, you can click on its page tab to put additional items on it that you want to appear on all the foreground pages it’s assigned to, like your company name or logo.

The color of the background can be defined by a theme. After a background is applied, additional themes with background colors appear in the Themes gallery. When one of these themes is applied, the background takes the color from the theme.

You can also click on the Background Color command at the bottom of the Backgrounds gallery to pick a color.

You can apply border and title designs to your pages in a way similar to backgrounds, using the Borders & Titles gallery on the Design tab. As with the Backgrounds gallery, a background page is created to hold the border shape. And you can right-click on the gallery thumbnail to choose to apply the border to all the pages in the document or just the current page.

You can edit the border’s title by clicking on the background page tab, selecting the border shape, and typing a title. This title will appear on all the foreground pages that the background page is assigned to, so it works best as a document title rather than a title for individual pages.

If you don’t want the border’s footer (which usually includes a page number) to appear at the bottom of the page, you can right-click on the border shape on the background page and choose Hide Footer.

Many Visio 2010 templates feature a new, consistent set of default line, font, and shadow properties that help make diagrams look more modern. In addition to these general enhancements, below are some specific templates with significant changes:

The Landmark Shapes stencil in the Directional Map template has around 30 newly designed shapes.

SharePoint 2007 included support for Visio workflows, but the 2010 release embraces it in a big way. In Visio 2010, there is a specific drawing template just for SharePoint Workflow. When you start up Visio, you can go to New->Flowchart->Microsoft SharePoint Workflow in order to start authoring a Visio SharePoint Workflow from scratch. You will notice that key SharePoint activities are available in three separate stencils: SharePoint Workflow Actions, SharePoint Workflow Conditions, and SharePoint Workflow Terminators. Every SharePoint activity directly maps to those available in SharePoint Designer 2010.

You can export it in a file that can be imported by SharePoint Designer 2010. By exporting the workflow to SharePoint Designer 2010, SharePoint specialists or IT professionals alike can further parameterize the workflows by binding workflow activity fields with SharePoint lookups and then publish as executable workflows. Visio will automatically validate the workflow first to make sure the workflow is valid. In the event that your workflow has issues, an Issues window will pop up, and the shape with the issue will be highlighted.

Here is a more comprehensive list of stencils and templates with new or updated shapes:

There is simply no other tool out there like Visio. There are some cheap solutions that try to do the basics, but Visio really takes it to a level that really sets it apart when it comes to multiple categories of visualization and illustration. Visio 2010’s major strength is its automation and ease of use in addition to its support across a wide variety of scenarios, which includes organizational and networking making it a powerful tool for a variety of scenarios. The integration and familiarity with products such as Microsoft Excel and SharePoint really makes Visio the number one choice to consider when it comes to business diagramming. The price is steep that’s for sure, but the features and improvements in Visio 2010 sure make’s it worth it.

Another opportunity Visio users should look forward to is the products support for the upcoming Office 365 services. Customers who have the SharePoint 2010 ECAL or Customers who are using an Office 365 E3 or E4 SKU will have access to Visio Services. Visio Services enables people creating advanced diagrams to share their great work (think process diagrams, SharePoint Workflows, visual business intelligence dashboards, IT/network monitoring, strategy maps, etc.) with others in their organizations or in their customer/partner set. When these diagrams are connected to and refresh with changes to live datasets, people can now use Visio as an important collaborative tool to help their organizations save time, money, reduce errors, and improve results.

Specs & Package
Overall Score	89%
Version Reviewed	Visio 2010
Release Date	Out Now
The Good Points	Support for Office Ribbon Improved productivity with Live Renderings Improved Accuracy when manipulating, adding and snapping shapes Better organization and welcome tools for dressing up flowcharts Improved integration with SharePoint and third party products such as AutoDesk AutoCAD
The Bad Points	Importing complex AutoCAD drawings can result in large files and it lacks some elegance when drawings show up on a page .dwg drawing is very small on the page making it hard to find initially.
In The Box	DVD, Small Manual
Similar Product	Microsoft Visio 2007 SmartDraw
System Requirements	Computer and processor 500 MHz or faster processor Memory 256 MB RAM; 512 MB recommended for certain advanced functionality Hard disk 2.0 GB available disk space Display 1024x768 or higher resolution monitor Operating system Windows XP (must have SP3) (32-bit), Windows 7, Windows Vista with Service Pack (SP) 1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2 and MSXML 6.0 (32-bit Office only), Windows Server 2008, or later 32- or 64-bit OS. Additional Requirements Certain advanced collaboration functionality requires connectivity to Windows Server 2003 with SP1 or later running Windows SharePoint Services. Multi-Touch features require Windows 7 and a touch enabled device. Certain inking features require Windows XP Tablet PC Edition or later. Speech recognition functionality requires a close-talk microphone and audio output device. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, 32 bit browser only. Internet functionality requires an Internet connection. Visual Reports require Visio Professional 2010 or Visio Premium 2010, as well as Project 2010 and Excel 2007, or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or later. Internet Fax not available on Windows Vista Starter, Windows Vista Home Basic, or Windows Vista Home Premium Certain online functionality requires a Windows LiveTM ID. Other Product functionality and graphics may vary based on your system configuration. Some features may require additional or advanced hardware or server connectivity; www.office.com/products.
Reviewer's PC	AMD 2.0 Ghz Turion 64 bit 4 GBs of RAM ATI X1600 Mobility Radeon 256 MBs of Vram 160 GB hard disk