Visio Third-Party Resources
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Fellow Visio MVP (Microsoft Valued Professional) Sites
  • John Marshall at MVPS. An excellent set of pages, including:
    • List of 3rd Party Sites
    • Common Questions
    • VBA Samples
       
  • Senaj Lelic, of DataAssist, based in Germany

 
Visio Books/eBooks for End-Users
Visio Inside Out (Nanette Easton) At this writing there has long been a 2002 edition, and a 2003 edition is in the works. Nanette is a former writer for Visio Corp, and the 2002 book is excellent. From all the usual places like amazone.com etc.
Ralph Grabowski: Author of numerous Visio books over the years. He has recently started releasing previous titles as eBooks. For example: Tailoring Visio 2002.
Discipline or Industry-Specific
Various generations of Visio include templates which address some of the areas listed below with varying degrees of sophistication.  The following are additional resources.
Architectural and Space Planning Bode Research Group Pre-fire planning and mapping. "detailed, professional looking street maps, pre-fire plans, fire critiques, haz-mat plans and tactical worksheets."
 
Castle and Cave Stencils, John Brown. Used for creating D&D floor plans, Free

CADplanners: The Solution for Space Planning VISIO Technical is now recognised as the ultimate software for hospitality space planning solutions. When combined with customised floor plans & smart shapes, venue managers will find Visio an invaluable management tool.

Office-Objects  is a groundbreaking package for office design. Imagine drawing the office space, applying the furniture using just drag-and-drop, making the floorplan available though the Internet along with a pricing proposal - all within a matter of minutes!
Architectural - 3D Lomasoft Corporation Including 3D ShapeView: "automatically converts your new or existing 2D drawings into 3D."
Business Process Triaster: The Process Navigator toolset addresses the need for a simple, enterprise-wide process mapping standard. Built on the Visio graphics engine, it incorporates state of the art software technology bringing valuable functionality at a new price point.

Interfacing Technologies Corporation FirstSTEP Charter is the Microsoft Visio-integrated tool that allows users across an enterprise to cooperatively create, view, edit and publish structured process models.
Chemistry Chemistry Lab Templates for Visio by Terence Tak-Shing Tam
Color Henk Koning: an experimental set of MS Visio 2000 drawings, which I made to investigate the color space and to establish a set of colors to be used in IT-architecture diagrams. I publish these diagrams because they may support you in finding the right color, or the right color combination for the shapes in your own MS Visio drawings.
Electrical/Electronics:
Closed-Circuit TV		 CCTV Software   Advanced CCTV Symbols contains pre-configured shapes, symbols and descriptions for all the main CCTV product areas such as cameras, housings, pan/tilts, transmission equipment, control equipment, VCRs and monitors.  Over 500 colour symbols.
Electrical/Electronics:
Wiring and Cabling		 DigiTools d-tools.com: Consumer and Custom Electronics design, engineering, estimating and documentation software.
Electronics Circuit
 Design		 Avista Design Systems  SpiceLink for Visio.  Provides circuit design inside Visio. SpiceLink automatically checks wiring errors and provides DC steady state (bias point) voltages and currents for the circuit.  (But it appears this product is being discontinued?)
Industrial Automation Entivity: Flowchart Programming Increases Productivity throughout the Automation Project Cycle. A Visio-based environment for configuring and programming industrial automation controllers, and a line of products to go with it.
Mechanical: Piping Piping Isometrics,  Junichi Yoda: A collection of very slick 3-D piping shapes, and a well-presented website.
Network Altima Technologies Inc.  (aka VisioStencils.com): Network documentation solutions within your favorite applications including  Microsoft Visio 5/2000/2002 PowerPoint and Word), Actrix(tm)Technical 2000, netViz, iGrafx and others. Over 40,000 manufacturer specific equipment shapes and port-level connection points, without the expensive learning curve. Regular web-based shape updates and free shape requests for all subscription customers.

Axis Communications:  The Axis Products stencil contains four Visio SmartShapes making it easy to add Axis Network Print Servers, AXIS NetEye 200, AXIS StorPoint CD and AXIS StorPoint HD in network diagrams.
Software/Systems:
UML and other
modeling notations.		 Holub UML Stencils
 
 Navision Software UML Stencils
 
Spartan Embedded Technologies  Software Engineering Standards stencil and examples.

Paul Herber Systems: Stencils and Addons for Jackson Structured Design, Specification and Description Language, and Message Sequence Charts
Software and Systems Diagrammatic Programming Corporation:  "Diagrammatic Programming is a notation and process for performing systems analysis and design [...]   allowing mixed systems of humans, machines, and computers to be designed and analyzed with unprecedented accuracy and visibility."

ThinkQuick Software: QuickFlow: generates graphical flowcharts of mainframe batch jobstreams. Automated RunBook is the product suite designed to generate the production support documentation for mainframe batch application systems by having 'the code generate the documentation.

Amarco is a service oriented method helping analyze and develop the architecture of the information systems. It is supported by tools that enable the set up of an organized repository, an automatic cartography of the systems and their interactions.  The architecture results obtained ease the analysis of complex systems, like ERP, supply chains etc.

Cognizant Design:  WolfFlow for JCL is a service that converts IBM Job Control Language(JCL) files into VISIO flowcharts and HTML web pages. On-line you send a JCL file to Cognizant Design. Cognizant Design converts the file to a VISIO flowchart and HTML web pages.

Software: Design for Web NYU RMM: Relationship Management Methodology:  The design of a WWW application can be succinctly represented with RMM diagrams so that designers, programmers and users have a clear understanding of the scope and structure of the application.
Miscellaneous ShapeDev.com: Some tutorials and samples.
For Visio Solution Developers (via ShapeSheet or Automation)
  • Visimation:  A variety of tools for developers and end-users, including "Xpose", an Automation object browser, with special features for Visio, including an improved ShapeSheet window substitute.
     
  • Visio Object Explorer:  A free tool for browsing Visio via Automation.  Helps for more quickly understanding Visio structure.  Designed for Visio 5 and although it works with Visio 2000 and V2002, it is not updated to reflect Visio 2000/2's new properties and cells.
Visio Solution Consultanting and Training
A number of the companies mentioned above also offer consulting and training service related to their discipline or industry. In addition...
Visio Sites that have Nothing To Do with Microsoft Visio
  • VISIO  is the official research journal of the International Association for Visual Semiotics

Contributions to this page are welcome, please see contact page to send me info.

Article Created: 2000-04-19  Last edit: Last edit: 03-11-24 Graham Wideman
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