We don't all agree about Visio WAS RE: [Sigia-l] Sitemapping and Macs

[Johnson, Bryce]

>If you are about to buy-in for VISIO. Stop there, and think million times.
>In all the privious discussions we had here, on this forum, nobody
>disagreed that VISIO is a difficult tool.

I disagree.
 
I know I'm changing the topic here (and platform wars are boring) but I honestly think that you need to find the best tool for your environment. When I say environment that means taking the needs and skills of the people you work with into account when you are coming up with a toolset. In a designer intensive environment I have no doubt that Indesign or Illustrator are better choices.

 

I used to do all my work in Illustrator 7 when I worked at a design firm then I had to switch to Visio 2000 because of requests from the people in my new team at the development house. Over the past 3 years I have learned to love Visio and I am more comfortable in it then any other tool. There are some things that are annoying but the product has improved greatly over the past few versions, the latest 2003 is more like the rest of the office family then ever. If you can use PowerPoint you can use Visio. 

 

The real power in Visio is the fact that it is a tool that allows you to build tools. We build custom shapes as they are needed and then the entire team uses them. Inter-team collaboration I feel will become very important in the future and I think that using an Office application will only help this. I haven’t used Indesign but I still use Illustrator often and I just don’t see Symbols being as powerful as Stencils. In Visio the shapesheet allows me to define the geometry with formulas and then lock them so that people can’t change them. This means that people who are just basic Visio users cannot break the templates or the shapes in them. All they need to know how to do is double-click and drag.

 

My humble opinion

Bryce