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)

Learn How to Diagram Efficiently

We learned how to automatically and manually create business process diagrams in the previous chapters; however, we often need to make some manual enhancements to improve the arrangement or add visual impact. We want to perform these tasks quickly and efficiently, so in this chapter, we will go through some skills to make our lives easier. We will learn how to make some useful hidden commands visible and some shortcut keys and keys combined with mouse actions that can speed up diagramming. We will also learn how to select a group of shapes and align or distribute them. Finally, we will go through the options for adding annotations to shapes and including borders and title blocks.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Editing the built-in ribbon to provide more options
  • Learning useful shortcut keys
  • Banding shapes together
  • Controlling the layout
  • Adding callouts for annotations
  • Adding borders and titles
  • ...