There are a number of add-ons that have disappeared from Visio over the years. This could be for very good reasons, but we oldies still miss some of their capabilities. So, I mention them not only to warn you that some documentation you may find on the web is out-of-date, but also possibly to encourage reincarnations.

For example, the Flowchart-TQM Wizard and the Network Diagram Wizard were deprecated in Visio 2003, but they provided a method to not only add shapes with data, but also to connect them together. The data linking and structured diagram concepts have been added to Visio since then, so a reincarnation would need to account for these.

The network discovery tool was last seen back in the Visio 2000 Enterprise Edition, and it had many devoted users for many years after that. This add-on would discover the connectivity of items in a network, create a database, and then diagram parts of it on demand in a Visio diagram. There are several third-party applications that are now available that can generate Visio diagrams of your network.

What all of the afore mentioned deprecated add-ons have in common is that they were not part of the core engine, and therefore, were more difficult to maintain and almost impossible to extend with third-party code.