To achieve the highest levels of productivity requires that all your software tools work together rather than against one another. Integrating your Visio drawings in Microsoft Office applications gets you off to a head start. Visio has worked closely with Microsoft to ensure that Visio software offers the highest possible integration available with the Microsoft Office suite. This article describes some of the components of Visio 5.0 that help achieve this high level of integration.

Toolbar compatibility
The toolbar behavior and appearance is fully compatible with Office 97. Office compatibility enables you to find menu items quickly and understand how to use Visio. Rather than spending valuable time re-learning how to accomplish basic tasks common to Office tools, you can spend time in Visio exploring the breadth of new features.

Send To menu
The Send To > hierarchical menu provides document email routing, and the ability to send documents directly to Exchange folders, as well as email recipients and fax machines.

Binder Functionality
Support for Binder 97 includes adding new COM interfaces that allow Header and Footers across binder sections, and the inclusion of Visio drawings in the Binder Print Preview across Binder sections.

Org Chart Wizard
The enhanced Org Chart wizard includes ODBC as a data source, plus the ability to create a clean, shared internal data model. This solution makes assistance with dynamic data linking and interactive drawing creation possible.

Property Reporting Wizard
Because Visio presumes Office is on the desktop, users can eliminate steps (such as copying to the clipboard, opening Excel and copying from the clipboard) by simply depositing information directly into an Excel spreadsheet for analysis.

Database Wizard
The database wizard allows you to link any Visio shape or drawing to any ODBC-compliant database, such as Microsoft Access 97 and Excel 97. It also support custom property types such as data and currency, and the automatic creation of database tables.

Visual Basic for Applications
Visio (all editions, Standard, Technical and Professional) includes the same Visual Basic development environment as the new Office 97 applications. End user can take advantage of powerful Visio documents that include VBA code, and developers cam use VBA to create custom Visio solutions. Because VBA us part of the Visio document, there is no need for Visio users to separately distribute a Visual Basic executable or add-on for other users to benefit from the functionality of embedded code.

Applications written using VBA will run at a rate of up to 10 times faster than those written in stand-alone implementations of Microsoft Visual Basic.

ActiveX™
Visio supports ActiveX, a set of technologies from Microsoft that enables interactive content for the World Wide Web. With ActiveX, it is possible to activate Web documents with multimedia effects, interactive objects and sophisticated applications. ActiveX provides the glue that ties together a wide assortment of technology building blocks to enable "active" Web sites.

Timeline
Timeline improvements enable more flexible project schedules and assists people in a variety of jobs to plan and manage projects. Gannt charts can be easily updated by either editing data information in the data columns and having the Timeline shapes move to the correct date positions n the chart, or dragging Timeline shapes to new positions and having the date information in the data columns automatically update.