Computers have allowed us to become tremendously more productive at our places of business. They have taken the redundancy out of many repetitive tasks, such as record keeping and reporting. If you rely on text and numbers alone when it comes to reporting on facilities management, project management, or business process management, you are missing out on an effective way to communicate your information to a wide audience, and that is through the use of professional diagrams. Diagrams can often say in a few images what often takes pages of text and numbers to get across to your audience. Visuals can also help make the complex ideas contained in your data much easier to understand. For this reason, many in the business world have turned to Microsoft Office Visio to help them prepare reports, documents and presentations that stand out from the crowd. The version Visio 2007 updates the outstanding Visio 2003 and makes it even more powerful than before.

Visio 2003 comes with all the features you have grown to appreciate when it comes to adding visual representations into your business documents. By using 2003, you can add clip art, even sound and video, into your presentations. You can keep the connection while still having the capability of moving and connecting shapes on your template page. Hyperlinks in this classic version make it easy to add shapes to other pages and even associated Web pages. You can even save your pictures as web pages, another time saver built into Visio 2003. Along with the ability to add pictures from your digital camera and scanner, you have a wealth of options for adding visuals to any business document, report or presentation with a couple of mouse clicks. When you are working on a group project, your team can stay connected by using Visio 2003's Microsoft Office SharePoint Server integration, which allows you to collaborate with other team members and share visuals.

Microsoft Visio 2007 takes all of the good ideas in Visio 2003 and builds upon them to make an even more useful Visio product. When you are in the thick of working on a template, you will be happy to discover the new time-savers that allow you to insert a text box and connect it to a diagram, and also the capability of 2007 being able to instantly align, position and connect shapes for you. You can also get rid of information that is hidden from view, which can help reduce the size of your file. Visio 2007 goes even further to make your diagrams look great, because it comes with samples that you can peruse to help spark your creativity when it comes to crafting your own, and Visio 2007 also allows you to pick a theme that can be consistent with all pages you are designing, for a professional look.

Both Visio 2003 and 2007 help make your life easier at work by making diagramming a snap.