Design & Drafting the Visio Way

Design and Drafting...
the Visio Way

Information

Visio, Visio Technical

What’s New in Visio 5.0

Microsoft Office 97 compatible

Shape Explorer™ for locating shapes, templates and stencils

Dynamic Line Routing automatically re-reroutes connections when a new shape is placed in the drawing

Dynamic Page Sizing to ‘drag’ your drawing page to a similar or larger size

Windows Automation such as VBA and ActiveX controls

Move and Offset individual shapes or groups of shapes

Rotate drawing page and geometry creations guides to easily construct any shape at any angle

Create your own Custom linetypes, line fill patterns (including AutoCAD hatch patterns) and end styles

Shape Explorer™ for locating and analyzing shapes, templates and stencils

ActiveX Control Support

Dynamic Page Sizing

Dynamic Line Routing to automatically re-connect and route shapes in flow charts and other business diagrams

Automated macros for analyzing data and creating geometry

Enhanced Property Reporting Wizard for BOM generation and data management

Customization with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), Visual Basic, C and C++

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Visio Technical 5.0 offers ease of use, intuitive design tools and Windows integration.

In the spirit of true Windows interoperability, Visio has revised their popular line of design software with version 5.0 releases of Visio Standard, Professional and Technical. Whether you’re designing a simple organizational chart, or a detailed floor plan for your manufacturing plant, Visio has the products to suit your needs.

The standard in ‘non-CAD’ Windows-based engineering design software was elevated a few short years ago with the introduction of Visio Technical, from Visio Corporation. The tradition has continued with the release of version 5.0.

Visio Technical
Visio Technical is the professional design software product used by hundreds-of-thousands of engineers and business professionals world-wide. Using Visio Technical you can easily create documents and diagrams such as complex building floorplans for space and facilities management planning, building automation, manufacturing and plant process designs, HVAC diagrams, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering schematics, and instrumentation and piping diagrams.

Visio Technical 5.0
Visio Technical is ideal for creating diagrams, such as this complex floorplan above. SmartShapes technology enables the assignment of intelligent attributes to such shapes so that you can extract non-graphical data from you drawings, and export it to other programs such as spreadsheets and databases for reporting, cost analysis, Bill of Materials creation, and more.

CAD Design Tools
Visio Technical includes all the necessary drafting features you would expect to create 2-dimensional drawing and schematics within a familiar Windows interface. Best of all, the Visio products are so easy to use, you do not need to know CAD commands and techniques to use them. You simply drag and drop intelligent SmartShapes® onto your drawing page. SmartShapes can easily be changed or updated with the click of the right hand mouse button to access the shape’s attributes such as size, orientation, etc. SmartShape symbols can even contain specific information such as color, cost, quantity, etc., which can be exported to BOM lists right on the drawing or to other applications such as spreadsheets and databases.

Windows Compatibility
Visio Technical is Microsoft OLE compliant so you can embed or link other OLE application data such as Microsoft Word or Excel files inside a Visio drawing. You can also embed or link a Visio drawing into other OLE compliant applications.

There are also unique ‘wizards’ included in Visio Technical such as a Project Timeline Wizard for tracking project life cycles, a NetList Generator which generates SPICE compatible files used for electrical schematic analysis, a Valve-Builder Wizard for easily creating ‘smart content’ in Visio diagrams. And an Area Analysis Wizard to calculate square footage in floorplans, space plans and facility drawings.

AutoCAD Compatibility
Visio Technical (as well as Standard and Professional) can read and display Autodesk’s AutoCAD .DWG, .DXF, and .DWF files, from v2.5 through to Release 14.01 (Visio Service Release 5.0b released in May 98 provides the extended DWG compatibility over the initial release), within a Visio diagram. You can also insert an AutoCAD drawing as an OLE object in Visio Technical allowing you to edit the .DWG file within Visio, and resave the drawing for subsequent use back in AutoCAD. When importing an AutoCAD drawing file into Visio Technical you can control the displayed and editable layers that will be available, and the sheet size and scale factor of the resulting Visio diagram.

Database Design
The Database Connectivity Wizard links any drawing with an ODBC-compliant database and keeps them in sync. For example, you can dynamically link a bolt shape to database containing bolt parameters. Then simply right click it to change from one bolt type to another. If you edit a bolt on screen, you can instantly save the new geometry in the database or vice-versa.

Data Integration
Using Visio Technical, you can assign intelligent attributes to a shape and use the Property Reporting Wizard to extract the data into an Excel or .TXT file format for use in other programs such as spreadsheets and databases. You can also create a Bill of Materials right on the current Visio drawing.

Internet/Intranet Management
Publishing documents to your Web site or Intranet is just as easy as using Visio by saving drawings as either HTML pages, or JPG, PNG, or GIF images. You can even attach URL links to shapes in a diagram allowing the user to ‘click through’ to related pages or other URL’s when viewing published Visio diagrams.

You can use Visio Technical to map an existing Web site and automatically generate the necessary diagrams to visually convey the structure and relationships of all the pages in the site.

Advanced Customization
Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) ids included in Visio Technical. VBA allows you to create and customize applications such as Office 97 products, that support VBA.

The VBA applet is attached to the actual Visio document eliminating the need for any recipient to have VBA to use the applet. You can also use standard Visual Basic, C and C++ to design your own solutions. Visio Technical even supports ActiveX controls so that you can embed your won Windows controls.

File Import/Export
The Visio line of technical design and diagramming software products support many file formats such as BMP/DIB, CGM, ESP/AI, IGES, JPEG, GIF, PNG, PCX, Macintosh PICT,TIFF, WMF, AutoCAD DWG, DXF and DWF files, Corel CMX, CorelFlow, CorelDraw 3-7, Micrografx ABC Flowcharter, Micrografx Designer, Micrografx Charisma, and Windows Draw files.

Article originally published by Man & Machine and reproduced with permission.

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