Book Image

Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio

By : David Parker, Senaj Lelic
Book Image

Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio

By: David Parker, Senaj Lelic

Overview of this book

Every business has process flows, but not all of them are fully described to or verified for accuracy with each stakeholder. This not only presents a risk for business continuity but also removes the ability to make insightful improvements. To make these complex interactions easy to grasp, it’s important to describe these processes visually using symbology that everybody understands. Different parts of these flows should be collaboratively developed and stored securely as commercial collateral. Visualize Complex Processes with Microsoft Visio helps you understand why it is crucial to use a common, systematic approach to document the steps needed to meet each business requirement. This book explores the various process flow templates available in each edition of Microsoft Visio, including BPMN. It also shows you how to use them effectively with the help of tips and techniques and examples to reduce the time required for creating them, as well as how you can improve their integration and presentation. By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered the skills needed to create data-integrated business flowcharts with Microsoft Visio, learned how to effectively use these diagrams collaboratively, but securely, and understood how to integrate them with other M365 apps, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Power Automate.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Learning to Manually Create Process Flow Diagrams

We learned how to create a Visio diagram in Chapter 1, using each of the available Visio edition applications. In this chapter, we will learn how to efficiently and manually create flowchart diagrams. These skills will give us the confidence to quickly and efficiently work with many types of diagrams. This chapter will provide us with an understanding of adding more shapes and connecting shapes together, and labeling them. We will also learn about special container shapes, such as swimlanes, and how we can link flowcharts across multiple pages. The following are the specific topics that will be covered in this chapter:

  • Setting the page size and orientation
  • Adding basic flowchart shapes
  • Relating shapes to each other
  • Labeling shapes and relationships
  • Adding more detailed information to shapes
  • Creating sub-processes
  • Validating the structure of these diagrams