Vendor's Description
The first Microsoft-developed version of Visio, Visio Professional 2002 provides diagramming solutions that help business and technical professionals document and communicate a broad range of ideas, information, and systems. Diagrams created in Visio Professional provide valuable insights into existing technical systems and help individuals and teams more effectively develop new ones. When used to augment text and numbers, Visio diagrams make a message more concise, help people remember main points, and transcend cultural and technical barriers.

Setup
Installation of Visio Pro is relatively simple. The Install Wizard guides you through the process, and upon completion, Visio Pro is ready to use.

In Use
Visio Pro's user interface felt a bit intimidating at first. You are provided with a lot of different templates to start with, starting with several groups (e.g., Block Diagram, Building Plan, Database, Flowchart, Network, Organization Chart, and so on), and then a specific template within the group (e.g.,within Database, there is Database Model, Express-G, and ORM). At first glance, I didn't really have a clue as to what many of these diagrams were for (such as Express-G and ORM), and I found it difficult to determine the best one to use for what I wanted to do. I tried a couple of projects to get a feel for the software.

I have a system architecture chart that I had originally created in Photoshop, and was attempting to recreate it in Visio Pro. I didn't find any of the "Database" templates to work for me, so I went hunting for others. The Data Flow Diagram under "Flowchart" sounds like a winner, but it didn't have the nice database "barrel" shapes that we use in our data flow charts. What seemed to work the best was the Enterprise Application design under "Software" (Data Flow also sounded like a good candidate within the same group, but it only consisted of 4 shapes, none of which being the database "barrel").

Although the task of finding the right template may be a bit daunting, the good news is that within any template, you can choose the "Find Shape" bar and simply search for the shape you want. A search for "database" pulled up quite a few shapes, many of which were suited for my needs.

There were pros and cons of Visio Pro's ability to connect the shapes. It comes with a "connector tool" which is built for this type of task, and there are many options to choose from for the connections (such as line type, arrows, etc.). A very nice feature of the connecting lines is the way it automatically creates the little loop bridges indicating when one line crosses another (this helps distinguish between a line that is crossing another line verses a line that connects to the perpendicular line). I found myself using the connector tool sometimes, and the line tool others (for various reasons), and to my dismay, the arrows created from both of these tools did not match. While the line tool supports angles, the connector tool appears to only support vertical and horizontal positioning.

The other project I attempted with Visio Pro was designing the layout of my kitchen (as I am considering redoing the kitchen). For this project, I went under "Building Plan" and chose Building Core (would have been nice to have seen a Kitchen template). Within Building Core, I was able to easily design the general wall and space layout of the kitchen to scale. It should be noted that there were a lot of templates in the Building Plan group, and within Building Core, there were a lot of shapes available. I'm tempted to say it came with everything except the kitchen sink, but it also didn't come with a stove or refrigerator shape (which is needed for designing a kitchen layout). It did come with countless other shapes for architecture, drawing tools, electrical and telecom, and walls and structures. The auto-dimensioning feature is very cool and extremely helpful in making the drawing to scale. There were vast selections of walls, outlets, and other drawing tools. The "Find Shape" bar was not available, but the same function is available under the "File" menu for any template. My search for a "stove" turned up empty, but a search for "range" did result with some good candidates. A search for "refrigerator" also turned up with a good shape. These objects were not in the right position for my drawing, but a simple right-click / Shape / Rotate-Left command got them positioned correctly. I was quite pleased with this project, a task which would have taken a lot more time done with other drawing applications.

Summary
If you are in need of a good design program, Visio Pro provides the goods. It comes with a lot of design-savvy tools and templates making it extremely easy to create any number of drawings, from data flow to architecture. Browsing through the various groupings and templates is not the easiest thing, but when you land the template you need, it's a breeze from there. Not all of the tools behave the same, so you may experience some frustrations depending upon your needs. All-in-all, this is a fine drawing tool that supports a tremendous amount of design and layout needs.

Pros

• Lots of different drawing types
• Lots of object and line tools
• Streamlines difficult layout drawings
• Makes drawing to scale a breeze
• Easy to find a shape if not part of the chosen template

Cons

• Line tool and Connector tool created different size arrow heads.
• Not the most intuitive interface (difficult to get lines to connect exactly where I wanted them to connect)
• Finding the right template can be difficult
• No Mac version

Overall Rating:

3 1/2 out of 5 Mice