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)

Adding borders and titles

We often need to add a title to each page and possibly a border too. This is less necessary for Cross-Functional Flowcharts because of the container that has an optional title bar.

There is a Banners stencil in online Visio that contains a number of pre-formatted title and sub-title blocks that can be added to the page, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 6.17 – Titles in online Visio

Figure 6.17 – Titles in online Visio

However, desktop Visio has a Design | Backgrounds | Borders and Titles drop-down gallery that can be used to add a pre-formatted border and title to the page. In fact, it does not add it directly to the page but creates a background page that can be viewed through the foreground page. For example, notice the VBackground-1 tab in the following screenshot:

Figure 6.18 – Borders and Titles in desktop Visio

Figure 6.18 – Borders and Titles in desktop Visio

In desktop Visio, we can use Insert | Text | Field to add automatically updating values,...