Chapter 18: Laying Out Floor and Site Plans

Overview

Whether you’re trying to make the setup of your manufacturing plant more efficient or just documenting the office seating chart, Microsoft Office Visio 2003 is a great tool for floor and site plans. Visio Standard includes a limited number of shapes specifically designed for creating office layouts, but you can, in fact, create a building shell for any purpose using its wall shapes. Visio Professional includes many more shapes for depicting home plans, manufacturing plants, office space, and all the related building services, such as heating and cooling systems, plumbing lines, and electrical layouts.

The shapes and templates for creating building plans were designed for simplicity. Anyone can create an accurate, to-scale floor plan if he or she measures and draws carefully. At the same time, if you have a background in architecture, construction, or engineering, you’re more likely to know how to design a good plan. If you don’t have that background, you’ll need to look elsewhere to fill in the gaps, but with this chapter you will learn how to take advantage of the tools that Visio offers.

New Feature Visio 2003 includes a new Space Plan Startup Wizard that makes it a snap to get up and running, and even easier to import data. Once you are finished, you can design custom Visio smart tags to assist your co-workers in using the plan. We’ll cover the Space Plan Startup Wizard in Chapter 26, “Managing Facilities with Space Plans.”

Note

Some of the techniques, shapes, and commands described in this chapter are available only in Visio Professional. A note appears when this is the case.