Visio 2007 Bible

Visio® 2007 Bible is as comprehensive a guide to the popular Microsoft diagramming software as a book of less than 1000 pages can be. Covering both Visio Standard and Visio Professional, this book explains Visio fundamentals as well as more advanced techniques that help you master any type of diagram. It also describes in detail how to use each of the specialized templates that Visio Standard and Visio Professional offer. Although the book provides an introduction to ShapeSheets and automation tools, one thing it doesn’t do is delve deeply into the development tools that Visio offers.

Visio 2007 includes some significant changes and enhancements as well as a few new templates, such as PivotDiagrams and ITIL. Visio 2007 offers new tools to help you visualize information— from Themes, which apply professional-looking formatting with a few clicks, to Data Graphics, which transform textual data into eye-catching graphics. Speaking of data, the new Data Link feature greatly simplifies integrating diagrams with external data sources. As always, a few features have been discontinued, including the Novel Directory Services template, and a few have earned new names, such as custom properties changing to shape data. Visio 2007 Bible identifies these new features, enhancements, and changes and differentiates the capabilities available in both the Standard and Professional versions versus those available only in Visio Professional.

Visio 2007 is a powerful combination of simple concepts and straightforward tools with far-reaching application. Whether you want to communicate basic business processes or highly specialized technical topics, Visio offers tools to simplify your work. This book strives to follow the same model. It explains Visio’s concepts and basic tools in a way that helps beginners get started and more advanced users get better. In addition, the book includes dozens of chapters on specialized templates that describe how the template, tools, and shapes support the work required and simplify typical tasks.