Microsoft Visio: Introduction for Beginners (2 day)

Course Overview

Microsoft Visio allows you to easily create a broad range of business and technical diagrams applicable to any organisation. In this course, you learn to use the Visio built-in templates and stencils to create sophisticated diagrams. You also learn how to incorporate Visio diagrams in Microsoft Office applications, including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

Microsoft are one of the world's popular software companies, this Visio course will help keep your skills up to date.

Audience

Individuals who want to create diagrams and present data that has a professional look and feel. Those who need to integrate Visio with other applications to automate the creation and maintenance of diagrams will find this course especially useful. Familiarity with Microsoft Office is helpful.

Skills Gained

• Create professional diagrams for a wide range of applications with Visio
• Apply the built-in features of Visio such as stencils, templates and connectors
• Develop diagrams to illustrate enterprise structure, workflow and scheduling
• Design detailed technical drawings for architectural and information technology purposes
• Link Visio diagrams to relational databases
• Integrate Visio with the Web to map Web sites and create Web page images

Course Outline

Introduction to Visio

• The strengths of Visio
• The role of Visio in the Microsoft Office suite
• Visio terminology

Visio Fundamentals

Basic drawing tools

• Rectangle
• Ellipse
• Line
• Arc
• Freeform
• Pencil
• Resizing and rotating shapes
• Aligning and distributing shapes
• Distinguishing between closed and open shapes

Navigating the drawing page

• Panning and zooming
• Viewing diagram details with multiple windows

Saving time with stencils and templates

• Maximising reuse of drawing elements
• Creating customised shapes, stencils and templates
• Previewing built-in templates using the Diagram Gallery

Annotating diagrams

• Adding and formatting diagram text
• Moving text with the Text Block tool

Linking shapes with connectors

• Applying intelligent routing between shapes
• Connection strategies: point-to-point or shape-to-shape

Developing Business Process Diagrams

Visualising organisation structure

• Illustrating enterprise hierarchies with organisation charts
• Automating diagram creation with the Organisation Chart Wizard

Describing workflow

• Identifying flowchart shapes and their meanings
• Capturing sequences of tasks and decisions with flowcharts

Documenting project schedules

• Importing schedule information from Microsoft Project
• Preparing project time lines for use in presentations

Incorporating Visio diagrams in Microsoft Office applications

• Linking to diagrams to enable active sharing
• Embedding diagrams to preserve their current state
• Inserting subsections of a diagram

Creating Architectural Diagrams

Visualising workspace layouts

• Configuring Visio for scaled drawings
• Mapping out office and home floor plans

Grouping related diagram elements with layers

• Distributing shapes across layers
• Protecting shapes by locking layers

Documenting IT Projects

Commonly used IT templates

• UML
• Windows XP User Interface
• Network diagrams

Illustrating database structures

• The importance of database schema
• Reverse-engineering diagrams with the Database Wizard

Interacting with External Data Sources

Defining and managing custom properties

• Locating custom properties in ShapeSheets
• Generating reports

Linking drawing shapes with data

• Mapping ShapeSheet entries to database fields using the Database Wizard
• Modifying the database from a drawing

Applying Visio Web Tools

Presenting Visio diagrams on a Web site

• Saving diagrams in multiple formats
• Static image format (GIF, JPEG)
• Deploying Visio Viewer plugin with Internet Explorer

Illustrating the Web site structure

• Mapping a complete Web site into Visio
• Identifying faults in Web sites