Visualizing Your Work with Visio

Manufacturer: Microsoft

Web site: www.microsoft.com/office/visio/downloads/default.asp

Estimated price: $199 Standard Edition

Visio gets onto this list because it’s a part of the Microsoft Office family of products. That means that the Microsoft Tablet PC Pack for Office XP does its magic to make Visio ink and speech compatible along with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Visio is a program with a slew of tools for drawing organizational charts, flowcharts, engineering specifications, architectural renderings — you name it. It has built-in symbol palettes (as shown in Figure 14-2) that you use to build your documents. With Ink capability, you can add handwriting to your schematics, annotate drawings, or add highlights all with your pen. As with other Office products, you can also use speech commands to tell Visio to do such things as undoing actions, saving files, or opening files.

Figure 14-2: Visio is a very handy little program if you build flowcharts or schematics for your work.

Visio also interacts beautifully with other Office products to generate charts from Excel worksheet content or to turn Microsoft Project task lists into graphically depicted timelines.

The current functionality is most useful in marking-up existing drawings because it has no functionality to convert roughly drawn shapes into polished chart elements; but Microsoft is promising greater ink functionality in the next version of Office and Visio.