It’s been a year of enhancements for Visio. In 2018, we released a host of new features that brought the power of Microsoft 365 to Visio—and vice versa. From the general availability of Visio Visual for Power BI to the Office Insiders preview for Export to Word, we’ve been especially focused on bringing together the productivity solutions you love with the diagrams you use every day. So far in 2019, we’ve worked on improving those releases and making those originally released for smaller audiences available to everyone. Here’s a quick recap of what’s happened with Visio during the past six months.
1) Improved touch and pen experience: This enhancement made the Visio touch experience more intuitive and seamless than ever. Using your pen or finger, you can now share your diagram, annotate and highlight diagram elements, erase suggestions, and quickly convert handwritten ink to digital text.
2) Export to Flow: Released earlier this year to Office Insiders, Visio and Microsoft Flow integration lets you create business process flows in Visio and quickly export them to Flow for automation. Once your diagram is complete, Visio walks you through all the steps to export it to Flow, like adding Flow actions and triggers and resolving validation issues.
3) Visio Visual enhancements: Much of our focus for “better together” releases—these are features that bring together Microsoft 365 and Visio—is to make Visio behave like a natural extension of the integrated Microsoft 365 solution. And this is exactly what we did with Visio Visual. Four new enhancements allow you to do things with Visio Visual reports in Power BI—set up email subscriptions, export reports to a PDF, export reports to PowerPoint, and add reports to Microsoft Teams—that you can already do with other Power BI visualizations.
4) Data Visualizer enhancements: A pair of improvements for Data Visualizer make it easier than ever to quickly convert Microsoft Excel process map data into professional-looking Visio diagrams. The first is a better Layout experience in Visio. You can now quickly reorient a variety of chart types—horizontal charts can be flipped vertically and vice versa—without sacrificing quality. The second, which is currently available in private preview, allows you to work with Data Visualizer diagrams directly in Excel with an intuitive add-in. Using the add-in, you can create flowcharts; view, print, and share flowcharts; and open Visio desktop or Visio for the web for additional editing capabilities.
5) Export to Word general availability: The title says it all: Export to Word is now available to all Visio Plan 2 users through Visio desktop. The feature leverages an intuitive wizard to help you export Visio diagram elements to Word. The resulting document pairs each element with its metadata, organized in a table, to give you a quick but detailed written reference to use for training, compliance, reporting and a variety of other purposes.
6) Crime Scene Investigation template: Back by popular request, our template for crime scene investigations has been re-introduced to Visio desktop. The template provides law enforcement agencies and investigators with three stencils—Indoor, Outdoor, and Evidence—that can be used to create visual reports and build elaborate and accurate crime scene diagrams. The Crime Scene Investigation template is available now for all Plan 2 users in US English only. Here's how you can find the template: go to "Suggested Searches" and select "Floor Plans." There you'll see the Crime Scene Investigation template. Double-click it to start creating your diagrams. Please be aware that the template must be open to access all the stencils.
Keep visiting Tech Community and follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay current on the latest releases. We also hope you’ll submit ideas for future features through our UserVoice site. Lastly, if you have specific questions or comments, please send a note to tellvisio@microsoft.com.