[Sigia-l] 3-D workflows

[Anders Ramsay]

One option is to color-code your workflows, place them in separate layers in
Visio (or Illustrator or whatever), and then print each separate layer onto
transparencies.  This would allow you to selectively display different
layers and show their inter-relationships.

Alternatively (especially if transparencies are not technically feasible)
you could export the layers to Flash (or Director or whatever) and use some
simple scripting to generate the same concept for presentation purposes
(i.e. for projecting the workflows), in which you turn visibility on or off
of selected layers.

(Actually, if you know VB, I believe you could do all of this inside Visio
as well.)

-Anders 
'
On 7/9/02 1:58 PM, Lord, Ralph at rsl3 at cdc.gov wrote:

> I'm looking for info on whether Visio or another Windows app (sorry, no Macs
> here) will let me create 3-D workflows. What we have is lots of
> interconnected flows.  The invidual flows are on separate pages and need to
> stay that way for simplicity. However, when we try to put them together to
> illustrate the big picture, it gets messy. Either we have one giant
> confusing diagram (and no plotter to make it more bigger), or we have
> several documents with "contact points" labeled that cause confusion. (What
> is circle "C" on page 3? Oh, that's where the output goes back into page 6.
> Where? Here, down in the middle of the page, see the other circle "C"?)
> 
> If I could stack the flows up (like a 3-level chessboard) and show the
> contact points as lines between planes, it might be clearer how the
> individual flows are related.  Of course, I'd like the planes in the big
> picture view to be linked to the individual flow docs for easy editing and
> updating.  Anyone know of such a thing?
> 
> Thanks,
> Ralph Lord
> CDC Bioterror Project
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