Visio is one of MS Office underutilized software products but it packs a lot of power for visually illustrating business concepts. With Visio, you can create complex organization charts, flow charts or diagrams, decision trees, illustrated calendars, gantt charts, time lines, directional maps and more. Visio is fully integrated with all of the MS Office programs allowing users to readily drop diagrams into a PowerPoint presentation or Word document.

Workspace– is the drawing space on which you will place the elements of your diagram. The workspace contains pages. Similar to Excel, each page of the diagram is represented by a tab at the bottom of the workspace.

Diagram – is the picture, sketch, drawing, or outline that you create to display your concept, idea or plan. Your diagram can be used to illustrate or explain how something works or to depict the relationship between the parts of a whole. The diagram can both contain geometric shapes and isometric shapes.

Stencil – related shapes are grouped together from which you can select to place into your diagram. The stencils open in a separate window on the desktop similar to the task pane found in other MS Office programs. As a default, each template presents the appropriate stencil to display shapes generally used in the template's diagram type. For example, when preparing a directional map, the default stencil will contain shapes associated with mapping diagrams. Other stencil collections can be opened independently of the template selected.

Template – predefine the workspace for your diagram by grouping together the appropriate set of tools for the diagram type. Templates contain styles, settings, toolbars, stencils and menus appropriate for the type of diagram defined by the template.

Shapes – are your basic drawing tools that are positioned on the diagram in a logical manner. Shapes can be in the form of a line, arc, ellipse, freeform, rectangle, box, triangle etc. Shapes in Visio perform within a predefined framework based on the template used but can also be used freestyle depending upon your diagram concept. Organized in a stencil containing the master shape, once placed on the diagram it becomes a copy of the shape which can be resized, rotated and combined with other shapes on the diagram.

Connectors –define the links between the shapes in the diagram. Connectors are either lines and arcs or specialized master shapes found in a stencil. Shapes contain connector points that facilitate shape to shape or point to point connections.

Drawing Tools – similar to PowerPoint, Visio drawing tools are used define styles applied the shapes including line style and thickness, fill colors, text patterns, drop shadows etc.



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