Microsoft Visio 2016

Before using Visio, you should take some time to understand Visio's interface and its main components.

With Visio 2016, you can create almost any type of chart by using extensive collections of drawing elements and styles from a convenient interface. To get the most out of Visio's many features, you first need to know how to navigate the user interface.

Visio drawings almost always consist of the following main components: shapes, stencils and templates.

The Backstage view provides a way to access many important commands that work "behind the scenes". There's a wealth of options that can make your work more efficient.

To save or share your work with Visio, you can save the content as a file in different formats or print your work results.

Use the Save command to save a new drawing in the current Visio format or in an older version format. You can also save a drawing as a graphic or in one of the many other formats available.

You can print Visio drawings using the backstage view.

Now that you've explored the interface and backstage view, customized the interface and identified the components of a drawing, it's time to create a first drawing.

When starting a new Visio file, it is often a good idea to start from a template. There are already a number of ready-made templates that can be selected at startup.

Working with Visio is based on the use of shapes and connectors.

A good visualization is half the battle when creating a graphic. Including important information through text on a shape can be key to creating a professional graphic. Learn how this works in this video.

When drawing an object, exact sizes and positioning are often required. Learn how this works in this video.

When working with Visio, you'll need to quickly manage a wide range of objects. You can easily select multiple objects and perform an action on them all simultaneously.

In this video, you will learn how to add additional information to your elements using callouts.

Now that you've created and modified a flowchart, you can apply your Visio skills to another popular diagram: organizational charts. If your organization has more than one employee, you probably already have a diagram of the hierarchy. With Visio, you can create a professional organizational chart that can be easily modified as your business evolves.

You can probably already imagine the next steps to create an organizational chart: drag shapes for each person onto the sheet and align them in a vertical hierarchy with appropriate connectors. Since organizations can have hundreds or even thousands of members, this can be very time-consuming. Get to know Visio's tools to simplify this task.

Creating an organizational chart from a blank template allows you to quickly create a diagram of the company hierarchy. However, it is often helpful to use sample layouts or a wizard to help you create diagrams.

Employee data from which a hierarchy can be created is often already available as a file. It could be a good idea to import these data into an organizational chart to save time.

As with any Visio chart, you may need to edit an existing organizational chart. Visio provides tools to improve the appearance of your chart. Learn how to modify an existing organizational chart.

Moving objects on the computer screen requires far less effort than moving real tables, chairs and machines to find the perfect arrangement. Particularly when it comes to observing exact dimensions, modeling floor plans and layouts in Visio can be a big relief.

You can use Visio templates to display the required layout in a diagram. Visio lets you resize objects to fit a Visio drawing. With Visio's built-in scaling and intelligent objects, you can easily create scaled diagrams such as floor plans, machine layouts, and more. Learn how to create a basic floor plan.

Visio is more than just a drawing tool. For example, you can use it to develop and test ideas such as meeting room layouts or machine placements, or you can use a Visio drawing to determine the number of physical pieces of equipment that can be placed in a room of the specified dimension. In this section, you can use Visio to model and test office layouts.

Now you can create a more complex flowchart to map interactions between different areas or functions. In this lesson, you will create a cross-functional flowchart.

If an organization wants to examine a process in more detail, it is a good idea to map the respective activities of the individual departments. The chart used for this purpose is a cross-functional flowchart and you can now learn how to quickly create it in Visio.

You have already created a cross-functional flowchart and filled it with content. You may need to format it to make the information easier to read and to draw attention to important elements. Learn how to apply formatting to a cross-functional flowchart.

Now that you've created both simple and sophisticated flowcharts, you can move on to another type of diagram that makes Visio stand out: the network diagram. Visio is so popular for this application that network equipment manufacturers even provide downloadable Visio network drawings on their websites.

A computer network diagram is a schematic representation of the nodes and connections in a computer network. It can also be used to represent a telecommunications network more generally. Learn how to create a network diagram.

Many of Visio's network diagram shapes represent topology shapes according to industry standards. As the industry standard for creating network diagrams, Visio has been used by IT professionals for over a decade and many manufacturers have created representations of their equipment in Visio templates.

You've now created a basic network diagram, but since it's also meant to be an inventory tool, you'll want to add more information. Visio provides the Shape Data Window that allows you to add conceptual depth to a diagram by using the shapes as information storages. Learn how to use Shape Data as an information storage.

Visio lets you assign shapes to a layer and assign general properties to all shapes in that layer.

If a network view becomes too complex, you can make unimportant parts disappear. Visio uses the concept of layers, with which you can organize content into layers and then display these layers as required.

In order to give your work a professional appearance and to adapt it to the CI requirements of your company, you also must consider certain visual styles. This section introduces Visio's design options.

Until now, you probably only used the standard versions of shapes and connectors in Visio. However, shapes and connectors have many properties that can be customized to change their appearance. Learn how to identify and use shape and connector formats.

Visio provides a range of designs and variations to make your charts look professional. The choice ranges from solid professional to contemporary and stylish designs. Each design comes in four variations, each offering its own color schemes and shapes, while remaining within the aesthetic concept of the design. Learn to apply designs and their variations.

If you customize existing shapes, it is helpful to save these customized shapes for later use. Learn how to adjust shapes permanently.

As a chart becomes more complex, you may want to visually group shapes to improve the organization and clarity of your presentation.

Visio drawings can become very complex and you want to make parts of them more visible. You could simply draw a frame around the desired area, but if you later want to move this area to other places or add more elements to this area, this solution is useless. In such cases, use containers or list containers instead.

In this course, you have learned the basics of Microsoft Visio, created a workflow diagram, an organization chart, a cross-functional flowchart and a network diagram. In addition, you used Visio's design features to create a more professional product.

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