Product Reviews

Microsoft's marketing team will tell you that the most significant thing about Visio 2002 is the degree to which it's integrated with Office XP. This may be true, but Visio has always been reasonably well integrated with Office - the then Visio Corp team played a bit part in the launch of Office 97, which not only had tight links with Office applications, but even had Visual Basic for Applications built in.

That might not strike you as overly significant, but when you see a demo of an office layout planner where removing a desk from the drawing removes the details from a neighbouring Excel chart and adjusts the price accordingly, you start to get the idea.

So how much more integrated is this latest version? Not much, to be honest. It has Office XP menus and the new Task Pane and the auto-correct features, which you either love or hate. The Drawing Type Selector, which opens when you start the application, looks like something lifted from Publisher, but works well. If Visio 2002 hadn't had the ability to access the XML that other Office applications can now produce it would have been criminal. But it has.

What's encouraging is that Visio 2002 is faster and more usable than its predecessors, thanks to a lot of input from the Office XP team. Simple things, like the visual drag kicking in almost instantly, make a huge amount of difference to the way you use the product. And the visual clipboard from Office XP is as useful here as in any of the other applications.

There are some unusual exclusions to Visio, as Office XP has the ability to add 'diagrams' - organisation charts, circular flow diagrams, pyramids and Venn diagrams - using AutoShapes. Add a new element to your diagram and the existing parts are resized and repositioned automatically. Visio 2002, bizarrely, has nothing to match it and, if you copy a diagram from another Office application, it becomes a group of component shapes, which are, in practical terms, impossible to edit.

Those who use it for building floor plan design will be pleased by the revolutionary introduction of curved walls. Getting drawings in from AutoCAD is both easier and more sophisticated. And objects for your floor plan can be pulled in from Active Directory, Exchange, Excel,

Organisation charts are improved, and the Org Chart Wizard is actually very good. But as the management consultancies continue the worthwhile task of flattening organisations and reinventing corporate structures, the emphasis is depressingly top-down and hierarchical.

I mentioned developers earlier, but there are two developer audiences for Visio 2002. First, the application is in itself programmable through VBA and provides a platform for some sophisticated solutions. Second, there's a collection of developer and IT department-related templates.

Starting at the most abstract and working down, you can use Visio to create diagrammatic layouts of your network. Stencils provide the ability to do this at either a physical level - with routers, hubs, switches, servers and so on - or a conceptual level, with stencils for Novell, LDAP and Active Directory configurations. The Active Directory stencil also contains a set of Exchange 2000 components and a very useful schema navigator.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Visio can be used to help design software at a reasonably low level. COM and OLE diagrams, Windows user interfaces and a range of conceptual diagrams are possible. Web sites, too, get the Visio treatment and conceptual site structure and design is a powerful tool set. However, there doesn't seem to be any way to either import from FrontPage's navigation structures or export out to them.

The question that remains - and it's only partly resolved by the new user interface, which makes finding what you want so much easier - is whether Visio attempts to do too much. Visually, the Gantt charts and other project-management tools are capable of producing stunning-looking output. But, except for the most simple of projects, Visio is no substitute for a project-management tool. Yes, you can import data from Microsoft Project 2000 and make it look more attractive, but would you actually do that?

The mind-mapping functionality is still woefully poor. It just isn't fast enough, although it allows you to do a reasonable job of creating distributable, electronic versions of maps you previously created on paper. But, again, it just seems to be in here because it's possible, not because it's useful.

The differences between versions have been tidied up somewhat. The Professional Edition, reviewed here, contains everything that's in the Standard Edition and the Technical Edition. In the current configuration, all three versions have something to offer, but I'd recommend taking a long look at the kind of drawings possible with the Standard and Technical Editions before plumping for the Professional. It has everything - including several kitchen sinks - but I suspect that the kitchen stencils aren't going to be that useful to a Windows UI designer.