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Its great for creating diagrams of complex things visually
- establishing relationships
- connections between components
- business and process diagrams
- automated company org charts
Its a great tool for documentation diagrams quickly. You can reuse the rich
library of visio stencils. lots of arrow callouts, rich shapes and
predefined business type charts, layouts, connection points, org chart
stencils and connectors.
However, its not built specifically for drawing complex, high precision
architectural line diagrams. For that your illustrator or CAD tool is the
right thing. For fast, simple business/engineering graphics, or even most
technical illustrations, Visio fits the need well for this business market.
Illustrator is a professional illustration tool, nonethless good to have in
a technical illustrators skill set. its got a much richer interface for
precision drawing, beziers, gradients, things you might miss in Visio if
you've been using Illustrator.
But Visio does its job rather well for the business/engineering/non-designer
diagramming market.
Daniel
-----Original Message-----
From: Sarah Stegall [mailto:sstegall -at- bivio -dot- net]
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2009 8:18 AM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Uses of Visio?
I was recently sent a set of Visio stencils designed for our hardware
products. Does anyone here use Visio for customer support documentation?
What specific documents do you use it for? I'm trying to figure out whether
I need it or not. It's an expensive piece of software. My tech support,
sales and engineering guys use it all the time for networking diagrams. I've
never had much use for it (I use Adobe Illustrator and OpenOffice for
drawing), but is it really an "industry standard" or just the
easiest/laziest solution? Opinions welcome, offline if you prefer.
Thanks.
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