[Sigia-l] Life after Visio

[Stewart Dean]

At 07:56 06/08/2003 -0400, Anne Hjortshoj wrote:
>Visio works great if you learn to use background pages and some of the 
>(very, very well hidden) palettes. It's unfortunate that the product hides 
>some of its best features. But if you take the time to learn about Visio, 
>you may find that it's very useful indeed.
>
>That said, I wish that Microsoft would (a) take the time to make Visio 
>more usable, so that people wouldn't have to buy one or more books to 
>figure out how to effectively use the tool and (b) optimize it for IA use.
>
>Here's a short list of helpful items in Visio:
>
>- Background pages: If you know how to use them, they will make your life 
>much, much easier. Forget layers, you won't need them anymore.
>- There are two palettes, a navigator palette and a page explorer palette, 
>that assist in zooming in/out and navigating among pages. I found that 
>these were quite helpful.
>-  The stencils under "Visio Extras" are probably among the most useful to 
>IAs, after the basic blocks. There are also Web GUI stencils available.
>
>Hope that helps.

Hi Anne,

I have used all the above features and have had to use visio a lot, but I 
do find it still find it irritating. Once learnt any program feels easier 
but I have to grin and bear it each time I hear the words 'we use Visio'. I 
have worked with folks who are wizards at Visio but I find it is still far 
to slow and chunky a tool to effectively work on large sites. For example 
merging two documents?  The ability to use multiple layers is something 
that can be very useful in a project (outside of just having a 
background).  The load up times, the problems with printing out PDFs, and 
even when using the page list it's still hard to move sections around.

It is always a personal taste issue which tool to use but I really just 
wanted to make people think about using Flash as a viable and credible 
alternative.

Stewart Dean

ps  I have no connection with Macromedia : )